You might have heard about “NAT Slipstreaming” by Samy Kamkar. It’s an amazing technique that allows punching a hole in your routers firewall by just visiting a website.
The attack depends on the router having the Application Layer Gateway enabled. This gateway can be used by anyone inside your network to open a firewall port (totally by design). Protocols such as SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) use it.
What I will focus on in this post is the Application Layer Gateway (ALG) and SIP.
HTTP Adaptive Segmented (HAS) streaming began to be used at scale from 2008 to 2012, with the advent of Move Networks, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, Apple HLS, Adobe HDS, and MPEG DASH. With the typical 10s segment durations of the day, livestream latencies (measuring latency as the time from an action being filmed to that same action being displayed on a device's screen) remained in the 30s to 60s range, trailing broadcast by a significant degree.