Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Jesske Request for Comments: 6432 L. Liess Category: Standards Track Deutsche Telekom ISSN: 2070-1721 November 2011Carrying Q.850 Codes in Reason Header Fields in SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Responses
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RFC 6432 Reason Header Field November 2011
Table of Contents
1. Overview
Although the use of the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Reason header field in responses is considered in general in RFC 3326 [RFC3326], its use is not specified for any particular response code. Nonetheless, existing deployments have been using Reason header fields to carry failure-related Q.850 [Q.850] cause codes in SIP responses to INVITE requests that have been gatewayed to PSTN systems. This document normatively describes the use of the Reason header field in SIP responses to carry Q.850 [Q.850] cause codes.
2. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
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RFC 6432 Reason Header Field November 2011 3. ApplicabilityThis document allows SIP responses to carry Reason header fields as follows:
4. Security Considerations
This specification allows the presence of the Reason header field containing Q.850 [Q.850] cause codes in responses. The presence of the Reason header field in a response does not affect the treatment of the response. Nevertheless, there could be situations where a wrong Q.850 [Q.850] cause code could, for example, cause an announcement system to play the wrong information. To avoid such situations, it is RECOMMENDED that this header field be protected by a suitable integrity mechanism. The use of transport- or network- layer hop-by-hop security mechanisms, such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) or IPsec with appropriate cipher suites, can satisfy this requirement.
5. Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gonzalo Camarillo and Mary Barnes for the detailed review of this document.
6. Normative References
[Q.850] "Usage of cause and location in the Digital Subscriber
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RFC 6432 Reason Header Field November 2011
[RFC3261] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston,