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by ignoramous 600 days ago
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.
2 comments

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.
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."