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[MMUSIC] comedia-fix and the whole source address/port boondoggle



comedia-fix again raises the argument against embedding the source address/port information in the SDP. That is something that I still feel strongly about, and work has progressed that makes use of it, although not as a fail-safe session correlation mechanism. We've found that it's useful as a DoS counter-measure, using the following design:

- An intermediate proxy on our network acts as a STUN-like
inverse-NAT translator to at least recover the likely address
from where the media will originate, and rewrites the SDP
if necessary.

- Our gateways, when under load, sort the incoming connection
pending queue based on source addresses that they expect
to arrive.

The idea is that when under DoS attack, connections sourced from uninvited addresses are not dealt with until the queue of invited addresses has been serviced. This is especially critical when the media is carried over TLS, and in our case we do not commence with the TLS handshake until either the connection has been correlated or until servicing the connection does not overload the gateway. The side-effect of a failed/incorrect inverse-NAT rewrite only occurs under heavy load, and is not fatal. But without the source address information, there is no way to implement such a scheme.

I believe that comedia adequately spells out the limitations imposed by various topologies (i.e., NAT), and the source address/port is still worth keeping.

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