UDP Hole Punching Research Articles

Beware: NAT Traversal is a Simple and Efficient Approach to Open Firewall Holes

NAT traversal techniques allow processes with private, non-routable IP addresses to communicate with other processes outside the network secured limits. Techniques such as UDP Hole Punching have been standardized by the IETF, and using tunnels based on those techniques it is easy to allow application processes on top of any transport protocol, including TCP, to both start and receive packets from the Internet across NAT devices. However, as a side effect those techniques also freely proceed through firewalls. In this work we describe how it is possible to configure any server running on any port (no firewall configuration required) to establish connections initiated at arbitrary Internet clients, making unauthorized services easily available. We also show that the process is lightweight, in particular after the initial setup is concluded, thus virtually supporting any type of unauthorized applications.

Design and implementation of P2P home monitoring system architecture with IP cameras for a vacuum robot in ubiquitous environments

We propose a peer-to-peer P2P home monitoring system architecture to exploit a vacuum robot with an IP camera, a movable IP camera. The key implementation issues for the proposed system are: i the easy configuration of a vacuum robot to connect to Wi-Fi network; ii the session management between a vacuum robot and a home monitoring server; iii the support of the network address translator NAT traversal between a vacuum robot and a user terminal. To solve these issues, we use and extend the Wi-Fi protected setup WPS, the session initiation protocol SIP, and the user datagram protocol UDP hole punching. To configure a vacuum robot easily, we present the GENERATE method which is an extension to the SIP that allows for the generation of a SIP URI. To reduce the load on the server for NAT traversal, we also devise the low time-to-live TTL-based UDP hole punching scheme.