Towards an Observatory for Network Transparency Research
Stephan Neuhaus, Roman Müntener, Korian Edeline, Benoît Donnet, Elio Gubser · 2016
The Internet is full of Middleboxes that change packets and flows. In fact, there is probably no IP o TCP header that is not affected by at least one middlebox. Obviously, middleboxes impede path transparency, i.e., the idea that an exchange of messages results in more or less the same packets, no matter what path the packets take. But no one seems to have a truly global view of what middleboxes do to packets on what Internet paths, which would however be essential knowledge for new transport protocols to be successfully deployed.