Google have just published the draft spec for a protocol called Roughtime, which allows clients to determine the time to within the nearest 10 seconds or so without the need for an authoritative trusted timeserver. One part of their ecosystem document caught my eye – it’s like a small “chaos monkey” for protocols, where their server intentionally sends out a small subset of responses with various forms of protocol error:

A healthy software ecosystem doesn‘t arise by specifying how software should behave and then assuming that implementations will do the right thing. Rather we plan on having Roughtime servers return invalid, bogus answers to a small fraction of requests. These bogus answers would contain the wrong time, but would also be invalid in another way. For example, one of the signatures might be incorrect, or the tags in the message might be in the wrong order. Client implementations that don’t implement all the necessary checks would find that they get nonsense answers and, hopefully, that will be sufficient to expose bugs before they turn into a Blackhat talk.

The fascinating thing about this is that it’s a complete reversal of the ancient Postel’s Law regarding internet protocols:

Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

This behaviour instead requires implementations to be conservative in what they accept, otherwise they will get garbage data. And it also involves being, if not liberal, then certainly occasionally non-conforming in what they send.

Postel’s law has long been criticised for leading to interoperability issues – see HTML for an example of how accepting anything can be a nightmare, with the WHAT-WG having to come along and spec things much more tightly later. However, but simply reversing the second half to be conservative in what you accept doesn’t work well either – see XHTML/XML and the yellow screen of death for an example of a failure to solve the HTML problem that way. This type of change wouldn’t work in many protocols, but the particular design of this one, where you have to ask a number of different servers for their opinion, makes it possible. It will be interesting to see whether reversing Postel will lead to more interoperable software. Let’s call it “Langley’s Law”: