Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Posted Dec 10, 2015 8:38 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
Parent article: Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

> We increasingly find ourselves on an Internet that can only manage TCP and UDP, and relatively unchanging versions of TCP and UDP at that.

Of course you meant HTTP.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3093 Firewall Enhancement Protocol (FEP)

Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Posted Dec 11, 2015 7:34 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

The RFC is supposed to be a joke, but it's surprisingly close to the truth. Basically, you have people using websockets over HTTPS to open tunnels between services. Bypasses firewalls, proxies, load balancers, everything. Evolution in action: by punishing anything that looks out of the ordinary, all network traffic evolves to becoming indistinguishable from eachother.

Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Posted Dec 11, 2015 11:19 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (1 responses)

> Basically, you have people using websockets over HTTPS to open tunnels between services.

Though my professor at the university was not really amused when I started insisting that the Internet's protocol stack is 8-layer (instead of the "traditional" 7 layers), where HTTP(S) is the top-most layer :) And it was a nontrivial number of years ago already.

Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Posted Dec 21, 2015 8:53 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Dan Kaminsky did a talk ones about using HTTP to transport packets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwbpnZe74ds

;-)