mtnego

mtnego is a hypothetical computer-network protocol used in educational materials to illustrate the process of feature negotiation between two endpoints during connection setup. The term appears in textbooks and lecture notes as a generic example, not as a deployed standard. In these contexts, mtnego models a two‑party negotiation where an initiator and a responder determine a set of mutually supported capabilities before establishing a session.

Operation proceeds in two phases: capabilities exchange and feature selection. The initiator advertises its supported features and protocol version; the responder replies with its own capabilities and selects the intersection. If the intersection is empty, the protocol returns an error and may negotiate a fallback mode or terminate the attempt.

Messages in mtnego are composed of Type‑Length‑Value fields (TLVs). Common types include MTNEG_VERSION, MTNEG_CAPS, MTNEG_FEATURE, MTNEG_RESULT, MTNEG_ERROR. Version negotiation allows for revisions; feature negotiation enumerates items such as encryption, compression, signaling options, and quality of service. The negotiation concludes with a MTNEG_RESULT indicating the agreed feature set.

Security and interoperability considerations are typical of hypothetical negotiation protocols: protection against spoofing, tampering, and downgrade attacks; recommendations include authentication and integrity protection at a higher layer and careful validation of TLV lengths and types. In practice, mtnego is used as an instructional abstraction rather than a protocol to be deployed.

History and usage: The mtnego label arises in academia and documentation as a schematic example of how two endpoints can negotiate capabilities. It has no formal standard, and there are no widely adopted real-world implementations beyond educational materials. The concept is often used to compare with real protocols that perform similar capability exchange and version negotiation.