Vahab Pournaghshband¹, Sepideh Hashemzadeh² and Peter Reiher³, ¹California State University, USA, ²IEEE Member and ³University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Internet middleboxes such as VPNs, firewalls, and proxies can significantly change handling of traffic streams. They play an increasingly important role in various types of IP networks. If end hosts can detect them, these hosts can make beneficial, and in some cases, crucial improvements in security and performance But because middleboxes have widely varying behavior and effects on the traffic they handle, no single technique has been discovered that can detect all of them. Devising a detection mechanism to detect any particular type of middlebox interference involves many design decisions and has numerous dimensions. One approach to assist with the complexity of this process is to provide a set of systematic guidelines. This paper is the first attempt to introduce a set of general guidelines (as well as the rationale behind them) to assist researchers with devising methodologies for end-hosts to detect middleboxes by the end-hosts. The guidelines presented here take some inspiration from the previous work of other researchers using various and often ad hoc approaches. These guidelines, however, are mainly based on our own experience with research on the detection of middleboxes. To assist researchers in using these guidelines, we also provide an example of how to bring them into play for detection of network compression.

Detection, Middlebox, Guidelines