TCP NAT Traversal

Gang,

A student of mine here at Cornell (Saikat Guha) is doing some cool work on
getting TCP to work through NAT boxes (i.e. both hosts behind NATs).   He is
looking at a suite of techniques, each designed to exploit NAT boxes with
different characteristics.  For the most part he has this stuff working in
the lab.  This is very exciting, since the assumption has been that you can't
get TCP to work through NATs.  

Our end goal is to develop a toolkit that robustly handles all the mechanics
of establishing TCP through NATs.  However, we still need to test more
broadly before we know best how to build that toolkit.

Towards that end, Saikat has developed a test client that does two things:
1) measures the characteristics of the local NAT box, and 2) attempts to
establish TCP with other test clients.  The results are gathered at a server
we are running at Cornell.

Anyway.....

We would REALLY REALLY appreciate it if all of you interested in this stuff
would download the client and run it on any windows machine behind a NAT box
(either home or work).  It takes about 10 minutes of your time.  The client
will run for some weeks...when we are done with the tests, you will be
informed via the client so you can uninstall it.

Also, I would appreciate pointers to any other P2P communities that should be
interested in this.

The test software is here:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~saikat/NATs.html

A paper describing the basic ideas is here:

https://www.guha.cc/saikat/files/papers/nutss.pdf

Thanks!

PF
 
ps.  One warning...some of the techniques require that we muck with IP
headers, which in turn requires that we run our own device driver.  When you
install this, windows warns you about the driver several times.  We have been
running it at a dozen or so machines here for many days without incident, so
we think it is pretty safe, but if you are squeamish about this you can stop
now.



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