fix(xnet): allocate ephemeral ports sequentially, not randomly (#180)

Ephemeral ports were drawn at random from the 16384-port dynamic range on
every dial. Under connection-per-request churn the birthday paradox reuses
a recently-released port after only a few dozen dials (~1% per dial at 200
outstanding-in-teardown), and a reused 4-tuple lands on whatever state the
previous conversation left along the path, such as the peer's TIME-WAIT
socket or a NAT's flow-table entry, which silently swallows the new SYN.
Measured end to end: an HTTP client with keep-alives off against a macOS
peer hit a dead dial after ~286 connections and stayed dark for ~30
seconds, exactly one 2MSL TIME-WAIT expiry.

Allocate sequentially from a per-stack random starting offset instead: a
port is only revisited after the full 16384-port cycle, and the random
start keeps a rebooted node off the ports its previous life just used.

TestEphemeralPortSequence pins the full-cycle-no-reuse property.

Co-authored-by: Derek den Haas <d.haas@directcode.com>
This commit is contained in:
Derek den Haas
2026-08-25 00:39:46 +02:00
committed by GitHub
parent 21f477b86e
commit 6313b1570d
3 changed files with 60 additions and 2 deletions
+21
View File
@@ -53,6 +53,10 @@ type StackAsync struct {
lookup dns.Message
dnssv netip.Addr
// ephPort drives sequential ephemeral-port allocation (see
// [StackAsync.ephemeralPort]); zero means not yet seeded.
ephPort uint32
ntpUDP internet.StackUDPPort
ntp ntp.Client
@@ -352,6 +356,23 @@ func (s *StackAsync) Prand32() (randval uint32) {
return randval
}
// ephemeralPort returns the next port of the IANA dynamic range (49152-65535,
// RFC 6335 §6), allocated sequentially from a random per-stack start so a port is
// revisited only after the full 16384-port cycle. Random selection instead reuses
// a recent port at birthday-paradox rates, and a reused 4-tuple can collide with
// state the previous conversation left behind (a TIME-WAIT, a NAT flow entry)
// which swallows the new SYN.
func (s *StackAsync) ephemeralPort() uint16 {
s.mu.Lock()
if s.ephPort == 0 {
s.ephPort = s.prand32()%16384 | 1
}
port := 49152 + s.ephPort%16384
s.ephPort++
s.mu.Unlock()
return uint16(port)
}
func (s *StackAsync) prand32() uint32 {
/* Algorithm "xor" from p. 4 of Marsaglia, "Xorshift RNGs" */
seed := internal.Prand32(s.prng)