On: A case against Layer 4 security tools

[JohnMakin]

"Less reliable: Layer 7 does not provide the same level of reliability as Layer 4, as it does not have the same error-checking mechanisms."

Uh, doesn't stuff like HTTP run on top of layer 4? (eg, tcp). This article doesn't seem entirely correct, but I'm a dunce with this stuff.

[marcus0x62 → JohnMakin]

Yes. If you need reliability guarantees (guaranteed in-order delivery and retransmission of lost packets,) TCP provides that, and by extension, anything built on top of TCP, inherits TCP’s reliability guarantees.

If you cannot accept the overhead of TCP’s reliability guarantees (or just don’t need it,) but still want service multiplexing, you’d typically use UDP for your protocol.