Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/869842/rss

Middleboxes are,
unfortunately in many ways, a big part of today’s internet. While middleboxes
inhabit the same physical niche as routers, they are not aimed at packet forwarding;
instead they are meant to monitor and manipulate the packets that they
see. The effects of those devices on users of the networks they reign over may be
unfortunate as well, but the rest of the internet is only affected when
trying to communicate with those users—or so it was thought. Based on some
recently reported research, it turns out that middleboxes can be abused to
inflict denial-of-service (DoS) attacks elsewhere on the net.