Searching for a quote

Fri Mar 13 05:25:58 UTC 2015

Robustness is desirable from a security perspective.  Failure to be liberal in what you accept and not being prepared to deal with malformed input leads to such wonders as the Microsoft bug that led to unexpected/malformed IP datagrams mishandled as "execute payload with system authority".  Rather than sloppiness you could also attribute the error to malice -- that it was injected at the specific request of certain government agencies, perhaps under threat, perhaps with just a wink and a nod ...

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Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.  Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.  Sometimes theory and practice are combined:  nothing works and no one knows why.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Michael Thomas
>Sent: Thursday, 12 March, 2015 18:32
>To: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Searching for a quote
>
>Jon Postel. I'm told that it is out of favor these days in protocol-land,
>from a security standpoint if nothing else.
>
>Mike
>
>On 3/12/15 5:24 PM, Tom Paseka wrote:
>> Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept
>>
>> ^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 5:20 PM, Jason Iannone
><jason.iannone at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There was once a fairly common saying attributed to an early
>>> networking pioneer that went something like, "be generous in what you
>>> accept, and send only the stuff that should be sent."  Does anyone
>>> know what I'm talking about or who said it?
>>>