The Fast Adaptive and Secure Protocol (FASP) is a proprietary data transfer protocol. FASP is a network-optimized network protocol developed by Aspera, owned by IBM. The associated client/server software packages are also commonly called Aspera. The technology is

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under US Patent #20090063698, ''Method and system for aggregate bandwidth control''. Similar to the

connectionless Connectionless communication, often referred to as CL-mode communication,Information Processing Systems - Open Systems Interconnection, "Transport Service Definition - Addendum 1: Connectionless-mode Transmission", International Organization for ...

UDP protocol, FASP does not expect any feedback on every packet sent. Only the packets marked as really lost must be requested again by the recipient. As a result, it does not suffer as much loss of throughput as TCP does on networks with high latency or high

packet loss Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data travelling across a computer network fail to reach their destination. Packet loss is either caused by errors in data transmission, typically across wireless networks, or network congestion.Kur ...

. Large organizations like IBM, the

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, the US

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National Center for Biotechnology Information The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. T ...

and others use the protocol in different areas.

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also wants to use the protocol for uploading to data centers.

Security

FASP has built-in security mechanisms that do not affect the transmission speed. The

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s used are based exclusively on

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s. Before the transfer, SSH is used for

key exchange Key exchange (also key establishment) is a method in cryptography by which cryptographic keys are exchanged between two parties, allowing use of a cryptographic algorithm. If the sender and receiver wish to exchange encrypted messages, each ...

for authentication. These randomly generated, one-way keys are discarded at the end of the transmission. The data is optionally encrypted or decrypted immediately before sending and receiving with the AES-128. To counteract attacks by monitoring the encrypted information during long transfers, the AES is operated in cipher feedback mode with a random, public

initialization vector In cryptography, an initialization vector (IV) or starting variable (SV) is an input to a cryptographic primitive being used to provide the initial state. The IV is typically required to be random or pseudorandom, but sometimes an IV only needs to ...

for each block. In addition, an integrity check of each data block takes place, in which case, for example, a

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would be noticed.

Protocol

FASP's control

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is TCP port 22 the same port that SSH uses. For data transfer, it begins at UDP port 33001, which increments with each additional connection thread. FASP's flow control algorithm, unlike TCP's, completely ignores packet drops. Instead, it acts on changes in measured packet delivery time. When that is growing, queues are getting longer and channel bandwidth is exceeded; falling, queues are getting shorter. Acting on this information is complicated because the receiver has it and the sender needs it, but its lifetime is often less than the transmission delay; and measurements are noisy. Thus, the sender uses a predictive filter fed updates from the receiver. The transmission rate is chosen to match and not exceed the channel bandwidth, and trigger no drops. By contrast, TCP slowly increases its rate until it sees a packet drop and falls back, interpreting any drop as congestion. On a channel with long delay and frequent packet loss, TCP never approaches the actual bandwidth available. FASP cooperates with TCP flows on the same channel, using up bandwidth TCP leaves unused.

References

{{Reflist Internet protocols Internet Standards Transport layer protocols

Security

Protocol

See also

References