Comment by phlo
12 years ago
STUN[1] does a very similar thing, including some trickery to get through all kinds of plastic boxes messing with your packets.
AeroFS[2] is another, interesting approach. It's basically a dropbox clone where all data remains on the user's computer. Transfers are encrypted with TLS and tunneled through the company's servers.
Another interesting thing might be Opera Unite[3]. It's an in-browser web server that can be souped up using various extensions like photo sharing, games or chat. As far as I know its NAT traversal is somewhat limited, though.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Traversal_Utilities_for... [2] https://aerofs.com/ [3] http://unite.opera.com/applications/
While on the topic of clever UDP-based NAT traversal techniques, I think my favorite to date is pwnat [http://samy.pl/pwnat/]. Uses ICMP in a clever way, requires no 3rd party.
Note that STUN itself does not do traversal for you - it simply gives you enough information to do it yourself.