RFC 3234 (rfc3234) - Page 2 of 27

Middleboxes: Taxonomy and Issues

RFC 3234            Middleboxes: Taxonomy and Issues       February 2002


Table of Contents

   1. Introduction and Goals.........................................  3
   1.1. Terminology..................................................  3
   1.2. The Hourglass Model, Past and Future.........................  3
   1.4. Goals of this Document.......................................  4
   2. A catalogue of middleboxes.....................................  5
   2.1 NAT...........................................................  6
   2.2 NAT-PT........................................................  7
   2.3 SOCKS gateway.................................................  7
   2.4 IP Tunnel Endpoints...........................................  8
   2.5. Packet classifiers, markers and schedulers...................  8
   2.6 Transport relay...............................................  9
   2.7. TCP performance enhancing proxies............................ 10
   2.8. Load balancers that divert/munge packets..................... 10
   2.9. IP Firewalls................................................. 11
   2.10. Application Firewalls....................................... 11
   2.11. Application-level gateways.................................. 12
   2.12. Gatekeepers/ session control boxes.......................... 12
   2.13. Transcoders................................................. 12
   2.14. Proxies..................................................... 13
   2.15. Caches...................................................... 14
   2.16. Modified DNS servers........................................ 14
   2.17. Content and applications distribution boxes................. 15
   2.18. Load balancers that divert/munge URLs....................... 16
   2.19. Application-level interceptors.............................. 16
   2.20. Application-level multicast................................. 16
   2.21. Involuntary packet redirection.............................. 16
   2.22. Anonymisers................................................. 17
   2.23. Not included................................................ 17
   2.24. Summary of facets........................................... 17
   3. Ongoing work in the IETF and elsewhere......................... 18
   4. Comments and Issues............................................ 19
   4.1. The end to end principle under challenge..................... 19
   4.2. Failure handling............................................. 20
   4.3. Failures at multiple layers.................................. 21
   4.4. Multihop application protocols............................... 21
   4.5. Common features.............................................. 22
   5. Security Considerations........................................ 22
   6. Acknowledgements............................................... 23
   7. References..................................................... 23
   Authors' Addresses................................................ 26
   Acknowledgement................................................... 26
   Full Copyright Statement.......................................... 27







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