0110 Stateless UAS Behavior

A stateless UAS is a UAS that does not maintain transaction state.

   It replies to requests normally, but discards any state that would

   ordinarily be retained by a UAS after a response has been sent.  If a

   stateless UAS receives a retransmission of a request, it regenerates

   the response and resends it, just as if it were replying to the first

   instance of the request. A UAS cannot be stateless unless the request

   processing for that method would always result in the same response

   if the requests are identical. This rules out stateless registrars,

   for example.  Stateless UASs do not use a transaction layer; they

   receive requests directly from the transport layer and send responses

   directly to the transport layer.

 

   The stateless UAS role is needed primarily to handle unauthenticated

   requests for which a challenge response is issued.  If

   unauthenticated requests were handled statefully, then malicious

   floods of unauthenticated requests could create massive amounts of

transaction state that might slow or completely halt call processing

   in a UAS, effectively creating a denial of service condition; for

   more information see Section 26.1.5.

 

   The most important behaviors of a stateless UAS are the following:

      o  A stateless UAS MUST NOT send provisional (1xx) responses.

      o  A stateless UAS MUST NOT retransmit responses.

      o  A stateless UAS MUST ignore ACK requests.

      o  A stateless UAS MUST ignore CANCEL requests.

      o  To header tags MUST be generated for responses in a stateless

         manner - in a manner that will generate the same tag for the

         same request consistently.  For information on tag construction

         see Section 19.3.

   In all other respects, a stateless UAS behaves in the same manner as

   a stateful UAS.  A UAS can operate in either a stateful or stateless

   mode for each new request.