2. Evolution from RFC 3489

STUN was originally defined in RFC 3489 [RFC3489]. That specification, sometimes referred to as "classic STUN", represented itself as a complete solution to the NAT traversal problem. In that solution, a client would discover whether it was behind a NAT, determine its NAT type, discover its IP address and port on the public side of the outermost NAT, and then utilize that IP address and port within the body of protocols, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) [RFC3261]. However, experience since the publication of RFC 3489 has found that classic STUN simply does not work sufficiently well to be a deployable solution. The address and port learned through classic STUN are sometimes usable for communications with a peer, and sometimes not. Classic STUN provided no way to discover whether it would, in fact, work or not, and it provided no remedy in cases where it did not. Furthermore, classic STUN's algorithm for classification of NAT types was found to be faulty, as many NATs did not fit cleanly into the types defined there.

Classic STUN also had a security vulnerability -- attackers could provide the client with incorrect mapped addresses under certain topologies and constraints, and this was fundamentally not solvable through any cryptographic means. Though this problem remains with this specification, those attacks are now mitigated through the use of more complete solutions that make use of STUN.

For these reasons, this specification obsoletes RFC 3489, and instead describes STUN as a tool that is utilized as part of a complete NAT traversal solution. ICE [MMUSIC-ICE] is a complete NAT traversal solution for protocols based on the offer/answer [RFC3264] methodology, such as SIP. SIP Outbound [SIP-OUTBOUND] is a complete solution for traversal of SIP signaling, and it uses STUN in a very different way. Though it is possible that a protocol may be able to use STUN by itself (classic STUN) as a traversal solution, such usage is not described here and is strongly discouraged for the reasons described above.

The on-the-wire protocol described here is changed only slightly from classic STUN. The protocol now runs over TCP in addition to UDP. Extensibility was added to the protocol in a more structured way. A magic cookie mechanism for demultiplexing STUN with application protocols was added by stealing 32 bits from the 128-bit transaction ID defined in RFC 3489, allowing the change to be backwards compatible. Mapped addresses are encoded using a new exclusive-or format. There are other, more minor changes. See Section 19 for a more complete listing.

Due to the change in scope, STUN has also been renamed from "Simple Traversal of UDP through NAT" to "Session Traversal Utilities for NAT". The acronym remains STUN, which is all anyone ever remembers anyway.