In this work, we extend Yarrpbox to assess the survivability of the TCP experimental option across paths toward the Tranco Top-100k domains. Our findings highlight middlebox interference and motivate broader Internet-wide studies. This study represents an initial step toward understanding the feasibility of extending TCP in today's Internet, while highlighting potential pitfalls that must be considered by future protocol designers.

The Internet has become an important part of our lives today, hence ensuring its security and reliability is critical. Internet outages happen frequently due to various factors, including human inter- ventions, natural disasters, and power outages. A key question is whether hosts become vulnerable when a network recovers from an outage impacting Internet infrastructure. This could happen if firewalls malfunction, even for a short while, allowing some ports to become unexpectedly open. This can potentially lead to expo- sure of previously restricted services to external users, making the network vulnerable to security threats. Previous work has shown that, in general, unnecessary open ports can increase vulnerabil- ities in systems. This study proposes a practical approach to examine network security post-outage by identifying newly open ports that can increase system vulnerability. The goal of this work is to show that such risks can indeed arise after an outage and that the proposed methodology detects these new ports.