[$] Weaponizing middleboxes

Middleboxes are,unfortunately in many ways, a big part of today's internet. While middleboxesinhabit the same physical niche as routers, they are not aimed at packet forwarding;instead they are meant to monitor and manipulate the packets that theysee. The effects of those devices on users of the networks they reign over may beunfortunate as well, but the rest of the internet is only affected whentrying to communicate with those users-or so it was thought. Based on somerecently reported research, it turns out that middleboxes can be abused to inflict denial-of-service (DoS) attacks elsewhere on the net.