> On Mar 12, 2015, at 1:38 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Mar 11, 2015, at 5:23 PM, Yoav Nir <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 11, 2015, at 8:54 PM, Russ Housley <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> About two years ago, I was at a workshop where someone claimed that the 
>>> Vendor Identifiers that are exchanged in IKE are very useful for dealing 
>>> with bugs.  The claim was that following the report of a bug, others could 
>>> adjust their behaviors to avoid the circumstances that enable the bug.  In 
>>> the worst case, they could refuse to talk to the badly broken version, but 
>>> accept connections to later versions where the bug has been repaired.
>>> 
>>> Does anyone have operation experience doing this kind of thing?  I want to 
>>> know if is real experience or speculation about what could be done.
>> 
>> I haven’t encountered this kind of use of a VendorID. Years ago there was a 
>> push by auditors for vendors to stop revealing their versions in protocols. 
>> As a result, our VendorID has not changed in ten years. I suspect the same 
>> is true for other vendors. So if a bug is fixed, the VendorID is not 
>> changed. I don’t believe the VendorID is a good way to identify buggy 
>> implementations.
> 
> As for buggy implementations, I think that it isn’t needed for that.  If 
> someone has a bug that breaks interoperability, we would in general take the 
> view of “if they fix it, it will work” — in other words, vendors normally 
> don’t take on the job of working around someone else’s mistakes.
> 
> Interesting story about auditors.  I haven’t run into any such thing.  I 
> would hope that most auditors have more sense than that.

Unfortunately, it’s far easier to stop sending the version than to argue 
against this.
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2004-2679

Yoav

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