After my talk in 33C3, George Hopkins has been doing some further reverse engineering of the Outernet protocols. By looking at the ondd binary, he has discovered that the length of the LDP header is not 6 bytes, but rather 4 bytes. He has sent a pull request with these changes. I have already merged it into free-outernet.
Thus, the last field of the LDP header as described in my previous post, which was formerly known as “B field”, gets now included in the payload of the package. The former “A field” is now the only field that identifies the port or service, and therefore it is now known as “type”. For file and FEC blocks, this change is small, because the former “B field” was always 0, so it gets incorporated into the “file id” field of the payload, which is now 24 bits long instead of 16 bits. For time packets it provides a nice way to interpret the packet as a variable record field structure. This interpretation now explains all the contents of the time packet.
After reviewing and merging George’s changes and while I still have these details fresh in my mind, I have updated the slides I used in my 33C3 talk to reflect these changes. These are the updated slides.
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