mafintosh / mafintosh/utp

Implement Path MTU Discovery as in libtorrent

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Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
92
Forks
11
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

this µTP library appears to hard code MTU to 1400 bytes. This will often work okay with home internet over UDP4 and UDP6, but may cause problems when people use tunnels like VPNs, especially if they chain several tunnels or proxies together for extra privacy. Supporting MTU discovery will also be important if users plug UTP in to other networks such as Bluetooth. An MTU of 1000 can be more appropriate for Bluetooth PAN as in phone internet tethering.

With recent news on dragnet surveillance and the renewed importance of leaking and anonymous communication, I feel it is important our network libraries have good support for very private users with multiple layers of proxies.

http://www.libtorrent.org/utp.html#path-mtu-discovery

I open this issue mainly as a discussion. I am not aware of any way in Node to disable the Don't Fragment attribute on outgoing UDP packets, so we cannot implement the libtorrent solution, at least not with native dgram.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked libtorrent Path MTU Discovery reference and Node's native dgram UDP API; the issue specifically notes that disabling the Don't Fragment attribute may not be available there. Determine the discovery approach for chained tunnels, proxies, and Bluetooth PAN, with completion meaning the library no longer relies on a fixed 1400-byte MTU.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
javascript, node.js
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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