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There is no secure notion of "correctly" that goes both directly against specs and de facto standards. I am struggling to even imagine how one could make an L7 balancer that should take into account possibilities that someone would go against HTTP spec and still get their request served securely and timely. I personally don't even know which L7 balancer my company uses and how it would cache GET requests with bodies, because I don't have to waste time on such things.

Running PostgreSQL on any non-privileged port is a feature, not a deviation from a standard. If you want to run PostgreSQL on a port under 1024 now that would be security vulnerability as it requires root access.

There is no reason to "build up a risk assessment and judge each deviation on its own merit" unless it is an unavoidable technical limitation. Just don't make your life harder for no reason.



> There is no secure notion of "correctly" that goes both directly against specs and de facto standards.

That's clearly not true. You're now just exaggerating to make a point.

> I am struggling to even imagine how one could make an L7 balancer that should take into account possibilities that someone would go against HTTP spec and still get their request served securely and timely

You don't need application-layer support to load balance HTTP traffic securely and timely.

> Running PostgreSQL on any non-privileged port is a feature, not a deviation from a standard. If you want to run PostgreSQL on a port under 1024 now that would be security vulnerability as it requires root access.

I didn't say PostgreSQL listening port was a standard. I was using that as an example to show the range of different risk appetites I've worked to.

Though I would argue that PostgreSQL has a de facto standard port number. And thus by your own reasoning, running that on a different port would be "insecure" - which clearly is BS (as in this rebuttal). Hence why I called your "de facto" comment an exaggeration.

> There is no reason to "build up a risk assessment and judge each deviation on its own merit" unless it is an unavoidable technical limitation.

...but we are talking about this as a theoretical, unavoidable technical limitation. At no point was anyone suggesting this should be the normal way to send GET requests.

Hence why i said you're looking at this far too black and white.

My point was just that it is technically possible when you said it wasn't. But "technically possible" != "sensible idea under normal conditions"




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