TCP Connection State Exhaustion: TIME_WAIT, Sockstress, and Why 4-Tuple Math Beats Port Counting
The ‘65536 port’ framing is wrong. TCP connection capacity is governed by 4-tuple uniqueness and kernel state tables, not port counts. This post breaks down TIME_WAIT exhaustion, Sockstress (window=0 + Persist Timer abuse), Slowloris-class L7 variants, and the conditions under which each is still effective today.