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Jingle SOCKS5 Bytestreams Transport Method This specification defines a Jingle transport method that results in sending data via the SOCKS5 Bytestreams (S5B) protocol defined in XEP-0065. Essentially this transport method reuses XEP-0065 semantics for sending the data and defines native Jingle methods for starting and ending an S5B session. &LEGALNOTICE; 0260 Experimental Standards Track Standards XMPP Core XEP-0030 XEP-0065 jingle-s5b jingle &stpeter; &dmeyer; &infiniti; &mlundblad; Klaus Hartke klaus.hartke@googlemail.com nx@jabber.org 0.5 2010-04-13 psa

Removed 'zeroconf' attribute for consistency with XEP-0065; clarified use of proxy-error condition; corrected schema.

0.4 2010-02-17 ml/psa

Added proxy-error action; added a block-size attribute in the transport-accept action when negotiating a fallback to IBB, analogous to changes in XEP-0261; editorial review.

0.3 2009-07-14 dm/kh/psa/jk

Major update to make Jingle S5B inherit more features from ICE and ICE-TCP. Added priorities and candidate identifiers. Renamed streamhost element to candidate element. Updated candidate selection to use priorities, and it is now required for both clients to send a candidate-used or candidate-error notification. Defined type attribute to differentiate between various kinds of candidates. More clearly described how S5B negotiation is completed, including an activated notification from responder to initiator when the candidate used is a proxy. Noted reuse of fast-mode methodology from S5B optimization specification. Because of incompatibilities with the previous version, changed the namespace to urn:xmpp:jingle:transports:s5b:1.

0.2 2009-03-09 psa

Minor changes to track modifications to XEP-0166; updated security considerations for consistency with other transport methods; added section on service discovery.

0.1 2009-02-19 psa

Initial published version.

0.0.3 2009-02-18 psa

Clarified order of events to be consistent with raw-udp and ice-udp.

0.0.2 2009-02-11 dm/jk

Specified that the responder can send <streamhost/> candidates, consistent with the earlier S5B optimization extension; this change required the introduction of streamhost-used and streamhost-error. Also added text to encourage the use of NAT-assisting protocols.

0.0.1 2009-02-10 psa

Rough draft.

&xep0166; defines a framework for negotiating and managing data sessions over XMPP. In order to provide a flexible framework, the base Jingle specification defines neither data transport methods nor application formats, leaving that up to separate specifications. The current document defines a transport method for establishing and managing data exchanges between XMPP entities using the existing SOCKS5 Bytestreams (S5B) protocol specified in &xep0065;. This "jingle-s5b" method results in a streaming transport method suitable for use in Jingle application types where packet loss cannot be tolerated (e.g., file transfer). Jingle-S5B reuses the protocol flow from XEP-0065 for the communication with a SOCKS5 streamhost; the communication between two clients to negotiate the possible candidates differs from XEP-0065 and shares similarities with &xep0176;

The basic flow is as follows. | | ack | |<---------------------------------| | session-accept | | (with S5B candidates) | |<---------------------------------| | ack | |--------------------------------->| | candidate-used transport-info | |<---------------------------------| | ack | |--------------------------------->| | candidate-used transport-info | |--------------------------------->| | ack | |<---------------------------------| | S5B "SESSION" | |<================================>| | session-terminate | |<---------------------------------| | ack | |--------------------------------->| | | ]]>

This flow is illustrated in the following examples (to simplify the presentation these use a "stub" application instead of a real application type).

It is RECOMMENDED that a client will offer as many <candidate/> elements as possible with itself as the host (i.e., non-proxy candidates). Such candidates might be found using the following methods:

  • Opening the TCP port on all available interfaces the user wants to use (e.g., maybe not an expensive UMTS link), including the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of that interface (if available).
  • Using the client's external IP address as discovered through an assisting NAT protocol or other means.

If the client knows it is behind a NAT and the router announces UPnP IGD or NAT-PMP support, the client SHOULD map the open port to the external interface of the router and include the public IP address and port information in the <candidate/> offers. To increase the chance of success without using a proxy, this specification allows the responder to also send offers, effectively equivalent to the "fast-mode" for SOCKS5 Bytestreams as previously described at <http://delta.affinix.com/specs/stream.html>.

Once the initiator has a set of candidates, it sends a Jingle session-initiate request that contains one or more transport candidates which are a mixture of XEP-0065 streamhosts and ICE candidates used in XEP-0176.

action='session-initiate' initiator='romeo@montague.lit/orchard' sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'> ]]>

The responder immediately acknowledges receipt.

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Depending on the application type, a user agent controlled by a human user might need to wait for the user to affirm a desire to proceed with the session before continuing. When the user agent has received such affirmation (or if the user agent can automatically proceed for any reason, e.g. because no human intervention is expected or because a human user has configured the user agent to automatically accept sessions with a given entity), it returns a Jingle session-accept message. This message MUST contain a &TRANSPORT; element qualified by the 'urn:xmpp:jingle:transports:s5b:1' namespace, which SHOULD in turn contain one <candidate/> element for each SOCKS5 Bytestreams candidate generated by or known to the responder, but MAY instead be empty if the responder does not wish to offer any candidates or wishes to send each candidate as the payload of a transport-info message.

If the responder sends candidates in the session-accept, the chances of a successful connection are increased. For example, the initiator might be behind a NAT or might have no access to a proxy, whereas the responder might have a public IP address, might know about a proxy, or might have NAT penetration support like NAT-PMP in a router. (Whereas this "fast-mode" was a special extension previously, it is the default in jingle-s5b.) However, the responder MUST NOT offer as a candidate any host/port combination that has already been offered by the initiator; this helps to prevent failure of negotiation with the proxy.

In the following example, Juliet's client opens one port. The provided <candidates/> are the (private) IPv4 address of the interface, a (public) IPv6 address, and the public IPv4 address created by mapping the private IP address/port using NAT-PMP.

action='session-accept' initiator='romeo@montague.lit/orchard' sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'> ]]>

The initiator acknowledges receipt and tries to connect to the offered candidates.

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A client SHOULD check the offered candidates in order of their priority, starting with the highest value. How the priority is calculated depends on the actual available interfaces. It is RECOMMENDED to use the following formula:

priority = (2^16)*(type preference) + (local preference)

The type preference is an integer value between 0 and 127. The following types and their suggested preference values are defined.

Type Description Preference Value
direct Direct connection using the given interface 126
assisted Direct connection using NAT assisting technologies like NAT-PMP or UPnP-IGD 120
tunnel Tunnel protocols such as Teredo 110
proxy SOCKS5 Relay 10

The local preference is used to rate different candidates of the same type, e.g. a DSL link might be preferred over a VPN connection. The value of the local preference SHOULD be between 0 and 65535. The proposed values are only guidelines. If a client wants to increase or decrease the value of a specific candidate it is free to do so. For instance, a client might have an expensive UMTS link as a last resort and might rate this link lower than all SOCKS5 relays.

After receiving its peer's candidates, a client start to connect to them in order of the priority. The protocol is described in XEP-0065 in detail. Once one client has successfully created a connection, it sends the <candidate-used/> element to the peer inside a Jingle transport-info message. If a client receives a candidate-used notification it SHOULD continue trying to connect to candidates of its peer if it has not tried all candidates with a higher priority than the one successfully used by the peer.

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The peer immediately acknowledges receipt.

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If a client is unable to connect to any candidate sent by its peer, or if it stopped trying to connect because its peer sent a candidate-used notification with a priority higher than its remaining candidate(s), it sends a candidate-error Jingle transport-info message (this is equivalent to the IQ-error with code='500' from the "fast-mode" extension).

action='transport-info' initiator='romeo@montague.lit/orchard' sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'> ]]>

The peer immediately acknowledges receipt.

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The transport negotiation is completed in one of the following ways:

  1. If both parties send a candidate-error notification then the SOCKS5 negotiation has failed and the parties need to fall back to some other transport method, typically IBB; see the Fallback to IBB section of this document for details.
  2. If one of the parties sends a candidate-error notification and the other party sends a candidate-used notification, then the candidate-used shall be considered the nominated candidate.
  3. If both parties send a candidate-used notification but the candidates have a different priority, then the candidate with the lower priority shall be considered the nominated candidate.
  4. If both parties send a candidate-used notification with candidates having the same priority, then the candidate chosen by the initiator shall be considered the nominated candidate (this is consistent with the rules in XEP-0166).

The parties shall use the nominated candidate for the data transfer. If the nominated candidate is of the proxy type, then the peer has no way to know when it can send data. Therefore the party that offered the nominated candidate MUST send an activated notification to the peer once it has activated the bytestream (as described in XEP-0065); it does so by sending a transport-info message containing an <activated/> element as follows.

action='transport-info' initiator='romeo@montague.lit/orchard' sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'> ]]>

If the nominated candidate is of the proxy type and either party cannot connect to the proxy (for example because of a restrictive firewall), the party shall send a transport-info message containing an <proxy-error/> element.

action='transport-info' initiator='romeo@montague.lit/orchard' sid='a73sjjvkla37jfea'> ]]>

The parties shall then consider the bytestream unsuccessful and fall back to IBB as described in Fallback to IBB.

Once the parties have chosen (and if necessary activated) a streamhost, they can exchange data as defined in XEP-0065.

Once the parties have finished using the bytestream (e.g., because a complete file has been sent), either party can send a Jingle session-terminate action.

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The other party then acknowledges the session-terminate and the Jingle session is finished.

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If the SOCKS5 Bytestreams negotiation fails, the parties might want to "fall back" to the transport of last resort, which for a streaming transport is typically &xep0047; as described for Jingle in &xep0261;. The protocol flow is as follows.

| | ack | |<---------------------------------| | session-accept | | (with S5B info) | |<---------------------------------| | [ SOCKS5 failure! ] | |x--------------------------------x| | transport-replace (IBB) | |--------------------------------->| | ack | |<---------------------------------| | IBB "SESSION" | |=================================>| | terminate | |<---------------------------------| | ack | |--------------------------------->| | | ]]>

First the initiator sends a Jingle session-initiate, in this case with a transport of SOCKS5 Bytestreams. The protocol flow is exactly the same as described above. If both clients are unable to connect to a candidate provided by the peer, both send candidate-error messages and SOCKS5 has failed. The initiator MUST either terminate the Jingle session with a Jingle reason of <connectivity-error/> or replace the transport with something else using the transport-replace action. Typically the fallback option is IBB (see, for example, &xep0234;). Therefore the initiator sends a transport-replace action including a transport of IBB.

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The responder then acknowledges the transport-replace action.

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If the transport replacement is acceptable, the responder then sends a transport-accept action to the initiator (if not, the responder sends a transport-reject action). If the responder wishes to use a smaller block size than the one specified in the transport-replace offer, this can be done by specifying a block-size attribute in the transport-accept action.

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The initiator acknowledges the Jingle transport-accept action.

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Now the parties can send data using In-Band Bytestreams as defined in XEP-0047.

The same processing rules and usage guidelines defined in XEP-0065 apply to the Jingle S5B Transport Method. Additional implementation suggestions are:

  1. A client SHOULD try the offered candidates in the order of their priority.
  2. If more than one <candidate/> element is present in a session-initiate or session-accept, a client SHOULD wait 200ms before trying the next one.
  3. If the candidate has a JID attribute and that JID is not the one of the peer it indicates the usage of a proxy. If the client had offered direct connection information it MAY want to wait a little bit longer than 200ms before trying the first proxy.
  4. A client SHOULD NOT wait for a TCP timeout on connect. If it is unable to connect to any candidate within 5 seconds it SHOULD send a candidate-error to the other party.

To advertise its support for the Jingle SOCKS5 Bytestreams Transport Method, when replying to &xep0030; information requests an entity MUST return URNs for any version of this protocol that the entity supports -- e.g., "urn:xmpp:jingle:transports:s5b:1" for this version &VNOTE;.

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In order for an application to determine whether an entity supports this protocol, where possible it SHOULD use the dynamic, presence-based profile of service discovery defined in &xep0115;. However, if an application has not received entity capabilities information from an entity, it SHOULD use explicit service discovery instead.

The exchange of candidates might result in exposure of the sender's IP addresses, which comprise a form of personally identifying information. A Jingle client MUST enable a user to control which entities will be allowed to receive such information. If a human user explicitly accepts a session request, then the client SHOULD consider that action to imply approval of IP address sharing. However, waiting for a human user to explicitly accept the session request can result in delays during session setup, since it is more efficient to immediately begin sharing transport candidates. Therefore, it is RECOMMENDED for the client to immediately send transport candidates to a contact (without waiting for explicit user approval of the session request) in the following cases:

  1. The user has permanently and formally authorized the contact to view the user's presence information via a presence subscription as reflected in an XMPP roster item (see &xmppim;).
  2. The user has temporarily and dynamically shared presence with the contact via "directed presence" as described in RFC 3921.
  3. The user has explicitly added the contact to a "whitelist" of entities who are allowed to access the user's personally-identifying information.

A Jingle implementation SHOULD support security preconditions that are enforced before application media is allowed to flow over the bytestream, such as those described in &xtls;.

This document requires no interaction with &IANA;.

The ®ISTRAR; shall add to its registry of Jingle transport methods a definition for the "jingle-s5b" transport method. The registry submission is as follows:

s5b A method for negotiating data exchange over SOCKS5 Bytestreams. streaming XEP-0260 ]]>
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