TCP
Latest
Google's speedier internet standard is now an actual standard
Google's QUIC data technology is now an official internet standard, potentially improving connections worldwide.
Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes
Normally, firewalls at cellular carriers are your best friends, screening out malware before it ever touches your phone. University of Michigan computer science researchers have found that those first lines of defense could be your enemy through a new exploit. As long as a small piece of malware sits on a device, that handset can infer TCP data packet sequence numbers coming from the firewall and hijack a phone's internet traffic with phishing sites, fake messages or other rogue code. The trick works on at least 48 carriers that use firewalls from Check Point, Cisco, Juniper and other networking heavy hitters -- AT&T being one of those providers. Carriers can turn the sequences off, although there are consequences to that as well. The only surefire solution is to either run antivirus apps if you're on a mobile OS like Android or else to run a platform that doesn't allow running unsigned apps at all, like iOS or Windows Phone. Whether or not the exploit is a serious threat is still far from certain, but we'll get a better sense of the risk on May 22nd, when Z. Morley Mao and Zhiyun Qian step up to the podium at an IEEE security symposium and deliver their findings.
Google suggests TCP tweaks to make web pages load faster
Google has already proven it can load web pages as fast as lightning and flying potatoes, but its "Make the Web Faster" team has grander designs. The speed junkies want to quicken the internet by reworking Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), a key communications method that helps keep the internet working. Google says that it can reduce latency and speed things up by increasing the amount of data that initiates a TCP connection, reducing the initial timeout from three to one seconds, consolidating packets using its new TCP Fast Open protocol and adopting a better algorithm for managing network congestion. These changes are backwards-compatible and open source, but sadly don't include any way to speed up internet standards ratification and deployment, so ironically this might take a while.
