Re: [cti-taxii] Open question: Server and User-Agent headers

From
Dave Cridland <>
Date
2017-02-08T11:24:00+00:00
ID
Thread
Re: [cti-taxii] Open question: Server and User-Agent headers
On 8 February 2017 at 08:44, Trey Darley  < 
>  wrote:
On 08.02.2017 02:28:45, Bret Jordan wrote:  >
> The MIME types say that it is STIX content or TAXII content. What
> people are asking for is the ability broadcast the type and version
> of the server / client.
>
Speaking from past experience debugging STIX/TAXII 1.x  interoperability issues, the problem is immeasurably easier when you  can clearly determine from your logs which implementations are  correlated with the issue(s).
As John Wunder pointed out during yesterday's working call, in some  instances (e.g., DISA STIG requirements) you need the ability to  disable this behavior. But in most cases it's helpful to have this  information at hand. QED, TAXII servers and clients SHOULD support  identifying their type and version via the headers but the behavior  MAY be disabled when necessary.
I'd be wary of saying "SHOULD but MAY be disabled"; it makes no sense in RFC 2119 terms. SHOULD implies a MUST which can be broken in rare cases; MAY is truly optional. In both cases this is for interoperability; you want debugging information. The DISA STIGs are not the only cases where implementation information is recommended against, in any case - this seems to be very much a matter of taste.
I would argue that TAXII ought to be silent on this matter - these are HTTP headers, and imposing any additional requirement on them seems a mis-step.
Dave.

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