Dennis and I presented Hole punching in the wild, learnings from running libp2p hole punching in production, measured from vantage points across the globe in the network devroom at FOSDEM 2023.
At FOSDEM 2022 I presented libp2p’s hole punching mechanism, overcoming NATs and firewalls with no dependencies on central infrastructure. One year has passed since. We rolled it out to live networks. We launched a large measurement campaign with many volunteers deploying vantage points in their home network, punching holes across the globe.
In this talk I will give an overview of the largest hack of the internet (aka. hole punching), dive into learnings running it on IPFS (~50_000 nodes) and finally present the data collected through our measurement campaign.
If you always wondered how hole punching works, how much more successful UDP is over TCP, whether IPv4 or v6 makes a difference, which ISP is most friendly to p2p and how to overcome symetric NATs, join for the talk!