Towards a middlebox policy taxonomy: Path impairments

Edeline, Korian; Donnet, Benoît

doi:10.1109/infcomw.2015.7179418

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…However, only one out of our 35 total test sources was entirely unable to communicate except for HTTPS signaling, which either points at an extremely restrictive middlebox behavior or failure to forward packets with an ID field value other than 0. Unless routers or middleboxes react to this field differently depending on other fields of the packet, this indicates a very large success rate when trying to send a value in the ID field across the Internet (3599 packets on 185 distinct paths), confirming a finding in [7].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

How to say that you're special

Barik

Welzl

Elmokashfi

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 Applied Networking Research Workshop

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The IP header should be the ideal part of a packet that an end system could use to ask the network for special treatment. Recently, there has been renewed interest in using bits of this header-e.g. the ECN and the DSCP fields. But can we really use these bits? Or should we try to use other bits? We contribute to the body of work that tries to answer these questions by reporting on IPv4 measurements regarding the DSCP field and the Evil bit. Our findings show unexpected treatment to packets that set either of these fields and also confirm recent results on IP Options and ECN.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

How to say that you're special

Barik

Welzl

Elmokashfi

2016

Proceedings of the 2016 Applied Networking Research Workshop

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“…We make an attempt at categorizing middlebox behaviors based on the potential path condition that they may cause, especially on transport protocols [21], [22], that aims at being used as an intermediate level of analysis between specific feature impairments and the global transport layer ossification phenomenon. To this end, we generalize the examples discussed in Sec.…”

Section: B Classificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bottom-Up Investigation of the Transport-Layer Ossification

Edeline

Donnet

2019

2019 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA)

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Recent years have seen the rise of middleboxes, such as NATs, firewalls, or TCP accelerators. Those middleboxes play an important role in today's Internet, and are now extensively deployed in various networks including corporate networks, Tier-1 ASes, cellular networks, and WiFi hot-spots. Unfortunately, despite the added value that they bring to networks, they radically change the transport paradigm from the legacy end-to-end principle, and drive increasing complexity in the path. The consequences of these changes are a wide variety of simple to subtle impairments to protocols and features, that in turn lead to the ossification of the network infrastructure. While the latter is now a well-known problem, its causes are not that much understood. To fill this gap, we provide a more detailed explanation of the factors of the transport-level ossification, and we give insights on their prevalence in the wild. We extract path conditions by processing a large collection of observations of middlebox in-path packet manipulations, and we categorize the observed transport impairments based on the complications that they engender. We show that more than one third of network paths are crossing at least one middlebox, and a substantial percentage are affected by feature or protocol-breaking policies. Finally, we show that the majority of the devices that implements them are located in edge networks.

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“…The main goal of mmb is to be easily configurable, and to allow defining a wide range of middlebox policies by combining rules, defined by using commands with a generic semantic [7,9], at high-speed. To this end, we define a grammar (see Fig.…”

Section: General Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

mmb

Edeline

Iurman

Soldani

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the Applied Networking Research Workshop

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Nowadays, Internet actors have to deal with a strong increase in Internet traffic at many levels. One of their main challenge is building high-speed and efficient networking solutions. In such a context, kernel-bypass I/O frameworks have become their preferred answer to the increasing bandwidth demands. Many works have been achieved, so far, all of them claiming to have succeeded in reaching line-rate for traffic forwarding. However, this claim does not hold for more complex packet processing. In addition, all those solutions share common drawbacks on either deployment flexibility or configurability and user-friendliness.This is exactly what we tackle in this paper by introducing mmb, a VPP middlebox plugin that allows, through an intuitive command-line interface, to easily build stateless and stateful classification and rewriting middleboxes. mmb makes a careful use of instruction caching and memory prefetching, in addition to other techniques used by other high-performance I/O frameworks. We compare mmb performance with other middlebox solutions, such as kernel-bypass framework and kernel-level optimized approach, for enforcing middleboxes policies (firewall, NAT, transport-level engineering). We demonstrate that mmb performs, generally, better than existing solutions, sustaining a line-rate processing while performing large numbers of complex policies.

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Towards a middlebox policy taxonomy: Path impairments

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

How to say that you're special

How to say that you're special

A Bottom-Up Investigation of the Transport-Layer Ossification

mmb

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