Firewall Traversal Method by Pseudo-TCP Encapsulation

Abstract

A wide range of communication protocols has recently been developed to address service diversification. At the same time, firewalls (FWs) are installed at the boundaries between internal networks, such as those owned by companies and homes, and the Internet. In general, FWs are configured as whitelists and release only the port corresponding to the service to be used and block communication from other ports. In a previous study, we proposed a method for traversing a FW and enabling communication by inserting a pseudo-transmission control protocol (TCP) header imitating HTTPS into a packet, which normally would be blocked by the FW. In that study, we confirmed the efficiency of the proposed method via its implementation and experiments. Even though common encapsulating techniques work on end-nodes, the previous implementation worked on the relay node assuming a router. Further, middleboxes, which overwrite L3 and L4 headers on the Internet, need to be taken into consideration. Accordingly, we re-implemented the proposed method into an end-node and added a feature countering a typical middlebox, i.e., NAPT, into our implementation. In this paper, we describe the functional confirmation and performance evaluations of both versions of the proposed method.