[Uptrenda]

Hello, I wanted to say I've been working on a peer-to-peer library and I'm very much interested in your work on symmetric NAT punching (which as far as I know is novel.) Your work is exactly what I was looking for. Good job on the research. It will have far-reaching applications. I'd be interesting in implementing your algorithms depending on the difficulty some time. Are they patented or is this something anyone can use?

Here's a link to an over-view for my system: https://p2pd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/p2p/connect.html

My system can't handle symmetric --- symmetric. But could in theory handle other types of NATs ---- symmetric. Depending on the exact NAT types and delta types.

[ignoramous]

I read OP's thesis (which focuses on CGNAT), and one of the techniques discussed therein is similar to Tailscale's: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

  ...with the help of the birthday paradox. Rather than open 1 port on the hard side and have the easy side try 65,535 possibilities, let’s open, say, 256 ports on the hard side (by having 256 sockets sending to the easy side's ip:port), and have the easy side probe target ports at random.

[Uptrenda]

this comment section has been the most useful and interesting thing I've seen for my own work in a very long time. And completely random, too. Really not bad. To me this represents the godly nature of this website. Where you have extremely well informed people posting high quality technical comments that would be hard to find anywhere else on the web. +100 to all contributors.

[synctext]

indeed, Tailscale was the first to realise this.

We added specific 4G and 5G mobile features. these carrier-grade boxes have often non-random port allocations. "By relying on provider-aware IPv4 range allocations, provider-aware port prediction heuristics, high bandwidth probing, and the birthday paradox we can successfully bypass even symmetric NATs."