Middleboxes such as firewalls, NAT, proxies, or Deep Packet Inspection play an increasingly important role in various types of IP networks, including enterprise and cellular networks. Recent studies have shed the light on their impact on real traffic and the complexity of managing them. Network operators and researchers have few tools to understand the impact of those boxes on any path. In this paper, we propose tracebox, an extension to the widely used traceroute tool, that is capable of detecting various types of middlebox interference over almost any path. tracebox sends IP packets containing TCP segments with different TTL values and analyses the packet encapsulated in the returned ICMP messages. Further, as recent routers quote, in the ICMP message, the entire IP packet that they received, tracebox is able to detect any modification performed by upstream middleboxes. In addition, tracebox can often pinpoint the network hop where the middlebox interference occurs. We evaluate tracebox with measurements performed on PlanetLab nodes. Our analysis reveals various types of middleboxes that were not expected on such an experimental testbed supposed to be connected to the Internet without any restriction.
Besides the traditional routers and switches, middleboxes such as NATs, firewalls, IDS or proxies have a growing importance in many networks, notably in entreprise and wireless access networks. Many of these middleboxes modify the packets that they process. For this, they to implement (a subset of) protocols like TCP. Despite the deployment of these middleboxes, TCP continues to evolve on the endhosts and little is known about the interactions between TCP extensions and the middleboxes.In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the interference between middleboxes and the Linux TCP stack. For this, we first propose MBtest, a set of Click elements that model middlebox behavior. We use it to experimentally evaluate how three TCP extensions interact with middleboxes. We also analyzes measurements of the interference between Multipath TCP and middleboxes in fifty different networks.
Abstract. Multipath TCP is a new TCP extension that attracts a growing interest from both researchers and industry. It enables hosts to send data over several interfaces or paths and has use cases on smartphones, datacenters or dual-stack hosts. We provide the first analysis of the operation of Multipath TCP on a public Internet server based on a one-week long packet trace. We analyse the main new features of Multipath TCP, namely the utilisation of subflows, the address advertisement mechanism, the data transfers and the reinjections and the connection release mechanisms. Our results confirm that Multipath TCP operates correctly over the real Internet, despite the presence of middleboxes and that it is used over very heterogeneous paths.
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