root/oscgroups/trunk/NAT_NOTES.txt

When implementing NAT traversal we need to consider the following:
( all quotes taken from [1] )

- NATs require some kind of periodic message to keep their port mappings
    current "some NATs have timeouts as short as 20 seconds"

    "Unfortunately, many NATs associate UDP idle timers with individual UDP
    sessions defined by a particular pair of endpoints, so sending keep-alives
    on one session will not keep other sessions active even if all the
    sessions originate from the same private endpoint. Instead of sending
    keep-alives on many different P2P sessions, applications can avoid
    excessive keep-alive traffic by detecting when a UDP session no longer
    works, and re-running the original hole punching procedure again ``on demand.''
        
- if UDP traffic is blocked by a firewall we might want to tunnel via TCP to
    a machine on the open internet. in this case we need to perform STUN protocol
    properly to analyze which machines are on the open internet (this info could
    be sent to peers with the status messages).

- might be better to transmit hashes of passwords rather than the passwords
    themselves to keep users who enter semi-important passwords from
    accidentally transmitting them as plain text.

- the udp port used to punch in a hole to communicate with other users
    could be selected dynamically rather than being fixed by the user
    "Finally, NAT implementations exist that consistently translate the
    client's private endpoint as long as only one client behind the NAT
    is using a particular private port number, but switch to symmetric
    NAT or even worse behaviors if two or more clients with different IP
    addresses on the private network try to communicate through the NAT
    from the same private port number"
    which means we should at least offer the option of clients manually
    setting their outbound ports to different values to avoid collissions
    behind the same NAT which exhibits the above behavior.


- skype tries to connect via port80 and https ports if it can't make a
    connection in other ways.
        
--
    "A few poorly behaved NATs are known to scan the body of UDP datagrams
    for 4-byte fields that look like IP addresses, and translate them as
    they would the IP address fields in the IP header. To be robust against
    such behavior, applications may wish to obfuscate IP addresses in
    messages bodies slightly, for example by transmitting the one's
    complement of the IP address instead of the IP address itself. Of
    course, if the application is encrypting its messages, then this
    behavior is not likely to be a problem."

- because sending requests to ports behind a nat can send the wrong request
    to the wrong machine, we need to make sure to handle this robustly
    in clients

[1] Bryan Ford, Pyda Srisuresh, Dan Kegel, "Peer-to-Peer Communication Across
    Network Address Translators", http://www.brynosaurus.com/pub/net/p2pnat/