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End Of the Line for SpeakFreely: NATed to Death
Arun writes "John Walker (of AutoDesk and Fourmilab fame), primary author of SpeakFreely, has decided to EOL the program (a pioneering network telephony effort), come January 15th, 2004. He cites difficulty in maintaining a decade-old code base, lack of appropriate developer support and a fundamental change in the peer-to-peer nature of the Internet upon which SF is dependent as motivating factors behind his decision. While the last release of the program will continue to be available from SourceForge, the main web site, mailing list, and web forum will be shut down on the aforementioned date." He's got some good points too, like how once IPv6 is more common, most users probably won't go back to one address per machine. I know I enjoy the added security of a NATed firewall, and without a really good reason, I won't be quick to give it up.
Why did I discover this cool application in a discontinuation announcement?
I wish I had discovered it earlier.
Oh well, I can only hope that I can repent this mistake in my next life.
I used this software several years ago. While it does exactly what it does, the biggest problem was the sever lack of an installed base. Once Yahoo started integrating voice chat into their IM client, I really had no use for it. Its unfortunate though, since I always felt the sound quality was inferior on Yahoo (and the others that have since come along), but I'd imagine that was due to those clients compressing more to save bandwidth.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)
:)
When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend in Canada
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
NAT is about address use, not security. In no way should NAT ever be confused with security, even if it appears to give you some security.
Every single security feature you like about NAT can also be had without NAT.
The common things people think they get with nat:
- Connections that must initiate from inside the network.
This is easily achieved with a normal firewall and routable addresses as well.
- My addresses aren't routable, so I'm more secure.
No, your addresses are perfectly routable, just the internet at large does not route them by agreement. Your ISP could easily configure it's routers to get traffic in to your network on those addresses.
- It hides the real addresses of my machines.
Not really... or more accurately, to an outside attacker, those addresses dont mean anyhting anyway. Whether they are known or not is not relevant. A firewall in front of a network of routable addresses could hide things equally well.
NAT by itslef does not reduce exposure. The best example of this would be those who configure nat in a hurry on linux 2.4 systems..... they set up an SNAT or masquerade rule in postrouting, and that's it.
That's nat, full, 100% working nat.
With absolutely no security.
The ISP could route to their internal network, no problem, making connections to whatever they want.
This is easily fixed by a few rules.. but then you are into firewalling, and not NAT at all.
192.168.0.5/16!
No...
172.18.1.3/12!
No, please, stop
10.255.255.255/8!
AAAAAHHAHAHRRRGGNO CARRIER
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Here in the netherlands at least, both the major broadband providers (UPC adn KPN)give all customers a generically routable IP.
Customers using a cable modem or dsl modem get a live wild-side IP and a unique hostname such as:
node139a2z.xs4all.nl
by which they're already DNS addresable.
Most commodity OS's and even the cheap (horrific!) home-router products I've seen have port forwarding capablity,so there's really no such problem as he describes here.
Does anyone have different experience elsewhere?
The States, for instance? I'd like to hear.
Liam.
Walker also lists an entire slew of other reasons, but if he used the NAT argument as his central reason to quit, I think he's being very short-sighted. Of course, "because I don't wanna" is always a perfectly valid reason in an open source world, too.
You can have a good and secure firewall even without NAT, in case you didn't know..
Ahh, but NAT is the simplest. I like the fact that I can get a hardware NATting firewall, plug it in, and know that the default configuration is secure. There aren't any holes anywhere, no cracker is gonna scan my network through it, nothing like that...
Sure you can get that with a regular firewall, but you have to configure it and monitor it and all sorts of other stuff that I, as a consumer, just don't want to do.
And FYI, I work in the TCP/IP security business. It's not that I don't know how to build a firewall. It's that I don't WANT to when I'm off work...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
The IETF midcom group has been working on solutions for passing media streams through NATs and other middleboxes for a few years now. One protocol, STUN, is already a standards-track RFC, and the group has other tools in progress. These tools work with the IETF multimedia suite (SDP, SIP, RTP, etc).
First off, let me say I have no idea what Speak Freely is. My comments are solely in response to some of the reasons he gives for discontinuing the program.
Had his reasoning behind discontinuing the project rested solely on his lack of time and an aging code base, I don't think I'd have an issue. Instead, he goes on to blame the NAT protocol and boxes that implement it, like the very popular cable/DSL "routers," and many of his issues seem to either misunderstand them or deliberately misstate what they can do.
He makes comments like, "Since the user no longer has an externally visible Internet Protocol (IP) address (fixed or variable), there is no way (in the general case--there may be "workarounds" for specific NAT boxes, but they're basically exploiting bugs which will probably eventually be fixed) for sites to open connections or address packets to his machine." He continues to state, "experience has shown that a large number of installed NAT boxes either cannot map an externally accessible port to an internal IP address and port, or those who install the boxes do not provide their customers adequate information to permit them to do this."
First of all, I have yet to see a NAT device that cannot statically map ports to a machine inside the local area connection. If there is one, I'd love to know about it so I can tell anyone to avoid it. Some are more rudimentary than others - like one I know about that has no UI to distinguish TCP and UDP inbound ports - but they all offer some way of mapping inbound ports.
His argument that they don't provide sufficient documentation to allow end-users to do so, and this may be the case. But if one is to discontinue development of a program based on the fact that someone else is providing poor documentation, there wouldn't be any development going on - documentation for most hardware/software products in the last 3 years or more have been horrid in my experience.
His argument that the internet is moving towards a client-server model rather than a peer to peer model is undeniable. It's been moving that way since they allowed home computers on the internet, and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Still, this doesn't mean the "clients" can't continue to utilize products that utilize a peer to peer architecture. He dismisses peer to peer file sharing products while overlooking the fact that they're the most successful peer to peer architecture network to exist in the history of the internet, and disproves his argument that NAT spells the end of peer to peer.
In the end, it seems he just didn't want to continue developing his program - and instead of being honest, he thought he'd use this opportunity to climb on his soapbox and make some waves by blaming NAT for the ills of the internet and the death of his program.
There's no added security to NAT. A nat box that blocks incoming connections is no more secure than a router that blocks incoming connections.
Ipchains used to let udp packets addressed to your internal net pass through untouched. All a hacker need do is guess your internal address space (all signs point to 192.168.0.*) and he could bombard your innards with all kinds of silly shit. And most exploits are emailed/downloaded trojans, not viruses in the old sense.
What NAT is, is convenient. I have my router box equipped with NAT and DHCP. I can bring home a laptop or plug something in, and presto! I'm online. No calling ISP and asking for another IP, no hoops to jump through.
I could pay for extra IPs from my ISP, but why? I dont serve anything from home, and neither do most home and small business users - thats what colos are for.
NAT is just way too convienient and sensible. It's like just plugging a phone into an extension, vs running it's own line.
And it works 99.9% of the time for me. Transparent proxies (ya mofo i violate RFCs by even transparently proxying http, i'm fucking crazy man, crazy!!) fill the gap for the 0.999%, leaving 0.001% of stuff a pain in the ass, and I can avoid that pain in the ass stuff since it's all warez clients, err p2p applications.
So, I don't mourn the loss of SpeakFree. Open source needs to be able to adapt to survive, too. NAT is here to stay.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
An interconnected system of networks that connects computers around the world via the TCP/IP protocol..
This means that the Internet is made up of networks which may themselves may be made up of networks, etc. These networks use a common protocol. Most would say that not every device on the network, or even every sub network on the network has to be connected to the Internet. It is quite arguable that there are benefits, both personal and for the commons, to not have every device connected to the Internet.
What is for sure is that for the Internet to run, everyone who uses it must contribute to it's well being. There has to be enough devices connected directly to the Intent to process and forward all the packets in an efficient and timely manner. I personally pay a number of services that manage such activity on my behalf. My personal machines, which are not in the primary bussiness of routing packets, are behind a NAT, which is.
Being behind a NAT allows me to manage my network with less effect on the rest of the community. There are still many security issues, and i can still flood others if I get infected, but it is a first step. I would argue that assuming every computer on every network to be directly addressable from every other computer on the every other network might not be the best design decision. It certainly fits in well with the TelCo desire to sell at least one IP per device, as they tried to do in the past with telephones, but other than that I do not see the benifit.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It is not a matter of (just) static port mapping, it is more a fundamental problem in the way DNS works with Internet addressing -- or more specifically, the way way applications interact with Internet addressing. (This will no doubt invite flames from those outraged at the idea that there might be a fundamental problem/mistake in the Internet.)
More specifically, what happens when you have multiple machines behind the NAT device? How do you map the ports statically to multiple machines *and* also communicate this information to devices on the outside of the NAT device? (That is, port 80 on the NAT device maps to server1, port 81 on the NAT device maps to server2, etc.)
The key issue is that applications are using network level addressing (IP addresses) rather than application level addresses (URLs) to establish the network connection -- we have network specific information far too embedded in the applications, which is why the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is such a nuisance. At the moment, the DNS SRV record could help with some of these matters by specifying a port number to use for a specific service and host/domain.
A better design for applications would be for them to be completely unaware of 'IP addresses' and function purely on URLs or hostnames + service name, and link to libraries or network drivers on the machine that handle the network aspects. Really -- excepting network mangement tools, what application bothers about the MAC addresses of machines or PPP negotiation details? IP addresses should not matter to the applications, either -- at that point, much of the arguments against NAT go away.
Honestly, the fact that NAT causes applications to break is more a reflection on mistakes in the architecture/application. IP packets themselves don't fall over and die just because they transition from a PPP link to wireless to ethernet to SONET to etc. The differing layers are independent of one another -- the applications have not yet been weaned off directly diddling with the IP layer.