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What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

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Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#11

Post by ay »

globular-toast wrote: post #3

What you want is a packet socket: sock_raw = socket(AF_PACKET , SOCK_RAW , htons(ETH_P_ALL)); IP networks should forward anything, but NAT is a major problem. Would be interesting to try with IPv6.

To second this and expand on the reasons behind:

The way the NATs (network address translators) are sharing the scarce public IPv4 addresses is by multiplexing on the transport level fields (ports in case of TCP/UDP and IDs or inner packet transport level fields in case of ICMP).

Since they are unaware of your protocol, they get into a “special case mode”, which on a naive translator might consume a whole IP address (so you would really make a network admin with a few of those, because you exhaust all their available addresses :-) ; but on the carrier grade NAT there are safeguards against it and the packets are just dropped.

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#12

Post by saurik »

15155 wrote: post #5
valorzard wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCTP is really cool, I first found out about it because it’s the basis for WebRTC data channels. It’s basically reliable UDP, but you can turn off the reliability if you want. Makes me wonder why QUIC exists when SCTP does…

> why QUIC exists when SCTP does Because QUIC uses UDP, which is supported by most/all intermediate routing equipment.

WebRTC runs SCTP over DTLS over UDP.

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#13

Post by geokon »

ay wrote: post #11
globular-toast wrote: post #3

What you want is a packet socket: sock_raw = socket(AF_PACKET , SOCK_RAW , htons(ETH_P_ALL)); IP networks should forward anything, but NAT is a major problem. Would be interesting to try with IPv6.

To second this and expand on the reasons behind: The way the NATs (network address translators) are sharing the scarce public IPv4 addresses is by multiplexing on the transport level fields (ports in case of TCP/UDP and IDs or inner packet transport level fields in case of ICMP). Since they are unaware of your protocol, they get into a “special case mode”, which on a naive translator might consume a whole IP address…

This is outside my area of expertise.. so naiive question.. but ports aren't tied to the protocol .. right? If you open a raw socket, it's still on some associated port number. NAT traversal multiplexes ports.. so why would that preclude using any arbitrary protocol?

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#14

Post by nubinetwork »

pkkm wrote: post #2

You don't need to make up your own for this experiment. There's already a pretty old protocol that's far superior to TCP, but failed to get adoption because of network hardware dropping everything other than TCP and UDP. It's called SCTP.

I thought the point was that they wanted to use something that didn't exist yet (either in RL use or in RFC form)...

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#15

Post by withinboredom »

geokon wrote: post #13
ay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To second this and expand on the reasons behind: The way the NATs (network address translators) are sharing the scarce public IPv4 addresses is by multiplexing on the transport level fields (ports in case of TCP/UDP and IDs or inner packet transport level fields in case of ICMP). Since they are unaware of your protocol, they get into a “special case mode”, which on a naive translator might consume a whole IP address…

This is outside my area of expertise.. so naiive question.. but ports aren't tied to the protocol .. right? If you open a raw socket, it's still on some associated port number. NAT traversal multiplexes ports.. so why would that preclude using any arbitrary protocol?

Ports are tied to the protocol. IP layer doesn’t have ports (it’s in the name).

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#16

Post by nlitened »

geokon wrote: post #13
ay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To second this and expand on the reasons behind: The way the NATs (network address translators) are sharing the scarce public IPv4 addresses is by multiplexing on the transport level fields (ports in case of TCP/UDP and IDs or inner packet transport level fields in case of ICMP). Since they are unaware of your protocol, they get into a “special case mode”, which on a naive translator might consume a whole IP address…

This is outside my area of expertise.. so naiive question.. but ports aren't tied to the protocol .. right? If you open a raw socket, it's still on some associated port number. NAT traversal multiplexes ports.. so why would that preclude using any arbitrary protocol?

Ports are part of TCP and UDP, not IP, as far as I can tell. So ports are tied to the protocol

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#17

Post by tsimionescu »

jeroenhd wrote: post #9
pkkm wrote: post #2

You don't need to make up your own for this experiment. There's already a pretty old protocol that's far superior to TCP, but failed to get adoption because of network hardware dropping everything other than TCP and UDP. It's called SCTP.

SCTP is fascinating because it's one of the backbone technologies that makes communication possible for most people on the planet (as the mobile network stack pretty much relies on it), yet it's effectively unsupported on almost every consumer device. If you want to use it, you're probably going to have to ship a userland implementation that needs privileges to open a raw network socket, because kernel implementation…

While the gist of your post is spot on, I do feel it should be noted that DoH is preferred over DoT not to protect from middleboxes that don't work properly, but from middleboxes that are actively trying to outright censor encrypted DNS, but can't afford to snoop on/prevent all HTTPS traffic. It's an anti-censorship measure, not a compatibility measure.

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#19

Post by tsimionescu »

geokon wrote: post #13
ay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To second this and expand on the reasons behind: The way the NATs (network address translators) are sharing the scarce public IPv4 addresses is by multiplexing on the transport level fields (ports in case of TCP/UDP and IDs or inner packet transport level fields in case of ICMP). Since they are unaware of your protocol, they get into a “special case mode”, which on a naive translator might consume a whole IP address…

This is outside my area of expertise.. so naiive question.. but ports aren't tied to the protocol .. right? If you open a raw socket, it's still on some associated port number. NAT traversal multiplexes ports.. so why would that preclude using any arbitrary protocol?

Ports are very much a concept of the transport layer. They are a very useful concept, so they are used in all major transport-layer protocols, but they are not necessary in a theoretical sense (though a transport layer protocol without them would only allow a single stream of traffic between any two machines, or at least IPs). But TCP port 22 is a completely different thing than UDP port 22, and they are both completely different from SCTP port 22. To prevent confusion, IANA typically assigns the same port number for a protocol on both TCP and UDP (e.g. DNS over TCP uses TCP port 53, just like DNS over UDP uses UDP port 53; and QUIC uses UDP port 443, just like HTTPS uses TCP port 443).

When a machine receives a packet, after the Ethernet and IP layers have made sure the packet is addressed to this machine, the very next thing that happens is checking what transport layer implementation should receive the packet - and this is done based on the "transport" bits in the IP header. If the packet is, say, TCP, then the TCP layer starts reading its own header and finds out the port number, and proceeds from there.

Re: What would happen if we didn't use TCP or UDP?

#20

Post by nly »

jeroenhd wrote: post #9
pkkm wrote: post #2

You don't need to make up your own for this experiment. There's already a pretty old protocol that's far superior to TCP, but failed to get adoption because of network hardware dropping everything other than TCP and UDP. It's called SCTP.

SCTP is fascinating because it's one of the backbone technologies that makes communication possible for most people on the planet (as the mobile network stack pretty much relies on it), yet it's effectively unsupported on almost every consumer device. If you want to use it, you're probably going to have to ship a userland implementation that needs privileges to open a raw network socket, because kernel implementation…

It gets worse in practice. Congestional control algorithms on the internet need to play nice with TCP Cubic regardless of how good they are.
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