Protocol ossification
Protocol ossification is a progressive reduction in the flexibility of network protocol design caused by the presence of middleboxes in the network which cannot easily be removed or upgraded to allow protocol changes. An example of this is the presence of firewall and carrier grade NAT middleboxes in the Internet, where over-cautious checking of protocol fields has prevented the use of those fields for future protocol expansion.[1]
Protocol ossification can be avoided by the use of encryption or tunnelling to hide the structure of new protocol extensions from older middleboxes.[2]
References
- ^ Papastergiou, Giorgos; Fairhurst, Gorry; Ros, David; Brunstrom, Anna; Grinnemo, Karl-Johan; Hurtig, Per; Khademi, Naeem; Tuxen, Michael; Welzl, Michael; Damjanovic, Dragana; Mangiante, Simone (2017). "De-Ossifying the Internet Transport Layer: A Survey and Future Perspectives". IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials. 19 (1): 619–639. doi:10.1109/COMST.2016.2626780. ISSN 1553-877X.
- ^ Corbet, Jonathan (January 29, 2018). "QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification". lwn.net. Retrieved 2020-03-14.
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