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[ NNSquad ] Re: "Deep Packet Inspection" Trade Group


At 11:39 PM 2/12/2008, Cliff Sojourner wrote:
 
>yes you can - you look at the DESTINATION IP and you rewrite the DESTINATION MAC.  and you send it.  that's it!  the packet has been routed.  and you did not look past the ENVELOPE.

So, it's OK to look at the "envelope," then? That's already sufficient to see IP and UDP ports, to note the destination, and to note traffic patterns. Plenty of grist for the mitigation of P2P (though inspecting more deeply can provide more accurate identification and prevent false positives). Our ISP's own homebrew P2P mitigation looks almost exclusively at header information, though it also does do some string searches as well.

>first, all intelligence at the edges is called source routing.  (does it work, hmm, another debate)

I was heavily involved with development of the first chipset for the IBM/IEEE 802.3 Token Ring, which was originally designed to allow source routing. During our group's experiments, we saw what a miserable failure source routing was. It requires far too much intelligence and memory in every edge node. It requires every edge node to know the state of the network between itself and any node with which it wants to converse. And it can't make good policy decisions such as how to allocate bandwidth between competing nodes and applications. We learned very quickly that it was appropriate and in fact important to make routers intelligent.

>second, high speed routers have specialized circuits in them that, yeah, are fast at what they do, but no, are not fast at anything else like graphics.

Indeed. And those circuits are managed by very smart processors, with lots of memory and brainpower, that configure them.

--Brett Glass