research-article

Is it still possible to extend TCP?

Authors:

Yoshifumi Nishida,

Adam Greenhalgh,

Hideyuki TokudaAuthors Info & Claims

IMC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference

Pages 181 - 194

https://doi.org/10.1145/2068816.2068834

Published: 02 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We've known for a while that the Internet has ossified as a result of the race to optimize existing applications or enhance security. NATs, performance-enhancing-proxies,firewalls and traffic normalizers are only a few of the middleboxes that are deployed in the network and look beyond the IP header to do their job. IP itself can't be extended because "IP options are not an option". Is the same true for TCP?

In this paper we develop a measurement methodology for evaluating middlebox behavior relating to TCP extensions and present the results of measurements conducted from multiple vantage points. The short answer is that we can still extend TCP, but extensions' design is very constrained as it needs to take into account prevalent middlebox behaviors. For instance, absolute sequence numbers cannot be embedded in options, as middleboxes can rewrite ISN and preserve undefined options. Sequence numbering also must be consistent for a TCP connection, because many middleboxes only allow through contiguous flows.

We used these findings to analyze three proposed extensions to TCP. We find that MPTCP is likely to work correctly in the Internet or fallback to regular TCP. TcpCrypt seems ready to be deployed, however it is fragile if resegmentation does happen---for instance with hardware offload. Finally, TCP extended options in its current form is not safe to deploy.

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Cited By

Li HDang YSun GWu CZhang PShan DPan THu C(2024)Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network FunctionsIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2023.330764132:2(971-986)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNET.2023.3307641
Hill LRotsos CEdwards CHutchison D(2024)Katoptron: Efficient State Mirroring for Middlebox ResilienceNOMS 2024-2024 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575815(1-9)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575815
Hilal FGasser O(2023)Yarrpbox: Detecting Middleboxes at Internet-ScaleProceedings of the ACM on Networking10.1145/35952901:CoNEXT1(1-23)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
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Index Terms

Is it still possible to extend TCP?
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cover image ACM Conferences

IMC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference

November 2011

612 pages

ISBN:9781450310130

DOI:10.1145/2068816

Program Chairs:
Patrick Thiran
EPFL, Switzerland
,
Walter Willinger
AT&T Labs-Research, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 November 2011

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https://doi.org/10.1109/NOMS59830.2024.10575815
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