An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks

摘要: The use of cellular data networks is increasingly popular as network coverage becomes more ubiquitous and many diverse user-contributed mobile applications become available. growing traffic demand means that carriers are facing greater challenges to provide users with good performance energy efficiency, while protecting from potential attacks. To better utilize their limited resources securing the client devices have already deployed various policies influence behavior. Today, these mostly opaque, though they directly impact application designs may even introduce vulnerabilities.We present NetPiculet, first tool unveils carriers' NAT firewall by conducting intelligent measurement. By running NetPiculet on major U.S. providers well deploying it a smartphone in wild covering than 100 ISPs, we identified key which direct implications performance, energy, security. For example, boxes firewalls set timeouts for idle TCP connections, sometimes cause significant waste devices. Although most today deploy sophisticated firewalls, still vulnerable attacks such battery draining denial service. These findings can inform developers optimizing interaction between also guide improving configurations.