[members-discuss] IPv4 Tweaking (was: RIPE NCC Charging Scheme 2025 Open House: Recording and Slides Available)

On 04.04.24 12:09, Aleksi wrote:
> So what's the complete unworkable thing on this?
> It requires zero network upgrades, only end points need to understand 
> this.

Go ahead and *prove* that.

Grab a bunch of middleboxes - plain NAT implementations, commercial 
firewalls, IPSes, application level gateways, even just routers that do 
fragmentation and/or reassembly, some of which have the *explicit task* 
to "normalize the bytestream" (as long as we're talking TCP) and thus 
regenerate packet headers from the info they gleaned from the original 
ones - and demonstrate that your "extension segments", wherever in the 
packet headers you plan to hide them, get through all of that unscathed, 
in spite of the boxes having no idea of what you're doing.

(And *then*, for sake of completeness, demonstrate that *somehow*, 
having the relevant "unextended" IP address NATed away also causes the 
corresponding extension to get dropped/invalidated - *still* with no 
pertinent update to the middleboxes to teach them about your scheme.)

Kind regards,
-- 
Jochen Bern
Systemingenieur

Binect GmbH