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Independent Submission R. Barnes
Request for Comments: 6919 S. Kent
Category: Experimental BBN
ISSN: 2070-1721 E. Rescorla
RTFM, Inc.
1 April 2013
Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels
Abstract
RFC 2119 defines a standard set of key words for describing
requirements of a specification. Many IETF documents have found that
these words cannot accurately capture the nuanced requirements of
their specification. This document defines additional key words that
can be used to address alternative requirements scenarios. Authors
who follow these guidelines should incorporate this phrase near the
beginning of their document:
The key words "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)", "SHOULD CONSIDER",
"REALLY SHOULD NOT", "OUGHT TO", "WOULD PROBABLY", "MAY WISH TO",
"COULD", "POSSIBLE", and "MIGHT" in this document are to be
interpreted as described in RFC 6919.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for examination, experimental implementation, and
evaluation.
This document defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
community. This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently
of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this
document at its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by
the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6919.
Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 1]
RFC 6919 Further RFC Key Words 1 April 2013 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Table of Contents 1. MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. SHOULD CONSIDER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3. REALLY SHOULD NOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. OUGHT TO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. WOULD PROBABLY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. MAY WISH TO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7. COULD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 8. POSSIBLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 9. MIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 11.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 11.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 2]
RFC 6919 Further RFC Key Words 1 April 2013 1. MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T) The phrase "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)" is used to indicate requirements that are needed to meet formal review criteria (e.g., mandatory-to-implement security mechanisms), when these mechanisms are too inconvenient for implementers to actually implement. This phrase is frequently used in a contracted form in which the parenthetical is omitted. The parenthetical may also be moved later in the sentence for stylistic reasons. If the parenthetical is present, authors MUST provide a reason why they know implementors will not heed this instruction in the parenthetical, as in the example (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T). In the below example, we show a case from RFC 6120 where the original text omitted the parenthetical, and we have indicated an appropriate parenthetical. For example: "For authentication only, servers and clients MUST support the SASL Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism [SCRAM] -- in particular, the SCRAM-SHA-1 and SCRAM-SHA-1-PLUS variants [(BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T, because your TLS library doesn't support extracting channel binding information)]." [RFC6120] 2. SHOULD CONSIDER The phrase "SHOULD CONSIDER" indicates that the authors of the specification think that implementations should do something, but they're not sure quite what. For example: "Applications that take advantage of typed links should consider the attack vectors opened by automatically following, trusting, or otherwise using links gathered from HTTP headers." [RFC5988] 3. REALLY SHOULD NOT The phrase "REALLY SHOULD NOT" is used to indicate dangerous behaviors that some important vendor still does and therefore we were unable to make MUST NOT. For example: "This command really should not be used" [RFC0493] Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 3]
RFC 6919 Further RFC Key Words 1 April 2013 4. OUGHT TO The phrase "OUGHT TO" conveys an optimistic assertion of an implementation behavior that is clearly morally right, and thus does not require substantiation. For example: "If a decision might affect semantic transparency, the implementor ought to err on the side of maintaining transparency unless a careful and complete analysis shows significant benefits in breaking transparency." [RFC2616] 5. WOULD PROBABLY The phrase "WOULD PROBABLY" indicates the authors expectation about what a reasonable implementation is likely to do in a given case. There is no requirement for implementations to be reasonable. This phrase is also a good example of an aspect of English grammar that is often useful in specification writing, namely the passive- aggressive voice, which provides a meaning in between the active and the passive voice. For example: "A SMTP client would probably only want to authenticate an SMTP server whose server certificate has a domain name that is the domain name that the client thought it was connecting to." [RFC3207] 6. MAY WISH TO The phrase "MAY WISH TO" indicates a behavior that might seem appealing to some people, but which is regarded as ridiculous or unnecessary by others. This phrase is frequently used to avoid further delay in approval of a document. For example: "Verifiers MAY wish to track testing mode results to assist the Signer." [RFC6376] 7. COULD The phrase "COULD" provides a way for specification authors to articulate existential possibilities, in order to provide a hint that might be critical to reliable or secure operation, but without a hard requirement. The lack of a requirement allows for vendor product differentiation. For example: "An implementation could mitigate this race condition, for example, using timers." [RFC6733] Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 4]
RFC 6919 Further RFC Key Words 1 April 2013 8. POSSIBLE The phrase "POSSIBLE" describes what some of the working group members thought of as an edge case that will never happen, but in practice allows the protocol to work at the most fundamental level. For example: "It is also possible for the server to send a completion response for some other command (if multiple commands are in progress), or untagged data." [RFC3501] 9. MIGHT The phrase "MIGHT" conveys a requirement in an intentionally stealthy fashion, to facilitate product differentiation (cf. "COULD" above). For example: "In the case of audio and different "m" lines for different codecs, an implementation might decide to act as a mixer with the different incoming RTP sessions, which is the correct behavior." [RFC5888] 10. Security Considerations Traditionally, security requirements in IETF documents have been expressed with a mixture of requirements words from RFC 2119 [RFC2119] and the phrases used above. The key words in RFC 2119 are principally useful when threats and mitigations are clear and well defined. The key words in this document can be applied when the threat model is ambiguous, and mitigations are unclear or inconvenient. 11. References 11.1. Normative References [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. 11.2. Informative References [RFC0493] Michener, J., Cotton, I., Kelley, K., Liddle, D., and E. Meyer, "GRAPHICS PROTOCOL", RFC 493, April 1973. [RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999. [RFC3207] Hoffman, P., "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over Transport Layer Security", RFC 3207, February 2002. Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 5]
RFC 6919 Further RFC Key Words 1 April 2013 [RFC3501] Crispin, M., "INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4rev1", RFC 3501, March 2003. [RFC5888] Camarillo, G. and H. Schulzrinne, "The Session Description Protocol (SDP) Grouping Framework", RFC 5888, June 2010. [RFC5988] Nottingham, M., "Web Linking", RFC 5988, October 2010. [RFC6120] Saint-Andre, P., "Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP): Core", RFC 6120, March 2011. [RFC6376] Crocker, D., Hansen, T., and M. Kucherawy, "DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures", RFC 6376, September 2011. [RFC6733] Fajardo, V., Arkko, J., Loughney, J., and G. Zorn, "Diameter Base Protocol", RFC 6733, October 2012. Authors' Addresses Richard Barnes BBN 1300 N 17th St Arlington, VA 22209 US EMail: rlb@ipv.sx Stephen Kent BBN 10 Moulton St Cambridge, MA 02138 US EMail: kent@bbn.com Eric Rescorla RTFM, Inc. 2064 Edgewood Drive Palo Alto, CA 94303 US EMail: ekr@rtfm.com Barnes, et al. Experimental [Page 6]