Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
Re: TCP port 6699 (follow up) & non standard traffic on standard ports
From: Dorian Moore <d () kleber net>
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 19:08:46 +0000
As a side note, I have noticed that we have touched on the topic of non HTTP protocols (e.g., SOAP) being engineered to be passed over HTTP, just the way that these Napster folks appear to be (ab)using the ports for FTP & telnet. I can only imagine that, in an effort to make an end-run around firewalls and proxies, many software developers will begin trying to tunnel all kinds of traffic over standard ports. It will doubtless be much more difficult to tunnel non-standard traffic over proxies than over masquerading firewalls.
Progressive Networks/RealAudio (http://www.real.com) are doing this allready, and have been for some time. The next version of Apple's Quicktime (v4.1) and the Darwin (open source...) Streaming server will also be set to 'emulate' an http transfer when a firewall is in the way. It does seem more and more common for this approach to tunnel client requests through open ports on a firewall so that the data type is transfered in this way, but theoretically applications protocols will be configurable to deny this kind of transfer. However I can see that this is opening the way to DOS attacks on end users... The RealPlayer applications is (IMHO) horrendously unstable as it is.. can't imagine it would take much to overload it. d. -- Dorian Moore is property of Kleber Design Ltd. If found please contact Kleber by phone on +44 207 581 1362 or visit http://www.kleber.net for further details. You really shouldn't listen to anything he says... as it may just be an opinion
Current thread:
- TCP port 6699 (follow up) & non standard traffic on standard ports mabrown (Nov 15)
- Re: TCP port 6699 (follow up) & non standard traffic on standard ports Dorian Moore (Nov 17)