Why don't Silverlight or Flash implement UDP sockets?

Question

I read that several browser plugins support UDP sockets (e.g. Java, Unity), however the most popular Flash plugin does not support UDP sockets !? And my beloved, and Silverlight.

Now I know that Silverlight 4.0 Beta has UDP multicast sockets, but they are useless on the public Internet, where I want to use the material that I create for the application in the browser. And I know that Flash 10 has RTMFP, but still it does not work as a one-time UDP socket.

So, I heard some theories that UDP is a security risk, but I really don’t understand how it is more connected with the fact that TCP, or how a policy server does not eliminate the risk. Please explain to me what is happening here. Thanks.

Answer 1

The dangerous part of UDP is that, unlike TCP / IP, it does not perform any acknowledgment. Effectively, this means that an attack application can be created that floods the LAN with UDP packets. I think it would be difficult to create a policy that could distinguish an attack application from a legitimate voice / video stream. Imagine this attack is found inside the network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_flood_attack . Even if you used the outgoing IP address as a filter, it would not be difficult for an external server to simply ignore the stream, since there is no policy for listening forcedly. The external server does not need to send anything at all, only beautiful fields will send ICMP errors back.

I also suggest that there may be some pretty creative ways to suppress a firewall that supports UDP bypass.

You can use the proxy server to convert UDP to TCP for security reasons. It is only cost effective for enterprise applications.