Hi David,

I can see the point with random constants, even though I think the risk for 
collisions is pretty small in practice -- especially in controlled experiments. 
What is more important is what Christian Huitema discusses in another message: 
to change the constants when the protocol evolves, at least when the spec is 
stable enough that you reach interop testing.

The reason I mention the multipath draft is of course that it is a wg document 
that has gone through a few revisions. If you think the constants are 
important, you should probably start there and not when someone presents a new 
idea for the first time for discussion.

BTW, the One True Way to generate random numbers is to hex dump /dev/urandom 
:-).

/me

________________________________
From: David Schinazi <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>
To: Michael Eriksson 
<[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>
Cc: Martin Thomson <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>, IETF QUIC 
WG <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: Fwd: New Version Notification for 
draft-piraux-quic-additional-addresses-00.txt
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2022 20:28:20 +0200 (Central European Summer Time)

Hi Michael,

While MT's comment might sound nitpicky, he's right in suggesting people use 
real PNRGs because we've already had collisions due to human-picked numbers in 
the past. The fact that quic-multipath made the same mistake doesn't make it 
best practice. (And FWIW I'm also guilty of having made that mistake in the 
past).

David

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 2:28 AM Michael Eriksson 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
 wrote:
On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 11:13:24 +1100, Martin Thomson wrote:
 > I see this in the draft:
 >
 > "TBD - experiments use 0xadda"
 >
 > I find it hard to believe that this value was chosen at random.
 > Please consult a random number generator for these values. And -
 > while you are developing proposals - larger values might be more
 > appropriate.

That was a pretty nitpicky comment... Have you read
draft-ietf-quic-multipath? The 0xbabaXX constants don't look very
random if you consider the affiliation of the first authors.

Also, what is a "large" value? 0xadda is big enough to require a
32-bit VarInt.

/me

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