Filtering UDP packets accidentally sent to my port

Question

I am designing a simple protocol on top of UDP and now I've realized that someone else can send a packet to the port I'm listening on. Such packet will obviusly be incorrect for my application (I'm not concerned about security now)

Is there the way of filtering these invalid messages? I was thinking about adding some fixed magic number at the beginning of each packet, but how large should it be? Is 16 bits enough?

Answer 1

I believe the typical solution is to require a handshake (that could include a "long enough" magic number) in the beginning of the session. Of course the "session" is something your protocol needs to keep track of, UDP does not have the concept. Keeping a list ip, port and last packet receive time for all current sessions should do it: then you can drop all packets from a peers that have not done the handshake beforehand. This not only prevents random unknown app traffic from breaking your application but will also prevent multiple legitimate peers from screwing up each others traffic.

Additionally you could add either a session id or an increasing packet sequence number (with allowances for missing packets) to packets if you need to ensure that the peer agrees with you on which session this is.