aws sns publising compressed payload - compression

There is a limit of 256KB as the max size of message which can be published to AWS-SNS. Can we compress a message using GZIP and send publish the compressed message to overcome the size limit ?

You can gzip the message body -- however -- SNS message bodies only support UTF-8 character data. Gzipped data is binary, so that is not directly compatible with SNS because not every possible sequence of bytes is also a valid sequence of UTF-8 characters.
So, after gzipping your payload, you need to encode that binary data using a scheme such as base-64. Base-64 encodes arbitrary binary data (8 bits per byte) using only 64 (which is 2^6, giving effectively 6 bits per byte) symbols and so the byte count inflates by 8/6 (133%) as a result of this encoding. This means 192KB of binary data encodes to 256KB of base-64-encoded data, so the maximum allowable size of your message after gzip becomes 192K (since the SNS limit is 256KB). But all the base-64 symbols are valid single-byte UTF-8 characters, which is a significant reason why this encoding is so commonly used, despite its size increase. That, and the fact that gzip typically has a compression ratio far superior to 1.33:1 (which is the break-even point for gzip + base-64).
But if your messages will gzip to 192K or lower, this definitely does work with SNS (as well as SQS, which has the same character set and size limits).

You already take a look at this? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-large-payload-raw-message-delivery.html
If you think that the file can increase on the time I suggest another approach.
Put the file on S3 bucket and attach the S3 Event Notification to SNSTopic so all consumer will be notified when a new file is ready to be processed.
In other word the message of the SNS will be the location of the file and not the file it self.
Think about it.

‪You can also use the SNS/SQS extended client library for large message payloads.‬
‪https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-sns-launches-client-library-supporting-message-payloads-of-up-to-2-gb

Related

decompressing IMAP deflated message

I have an issue trying to decompress an imap message compressed using deflate method. The things I've tryed so far were isolating one of the directions of an IMAP conversation (using wireshark's follow tcp function) and saving the message data in an raw format that I hope it contains only the deflated message part. I then found some programs like tinf (1st and 3rd example) and miniz (tgunzip example) and tryed to inflate back that file, but with no succes.
I am missing something? Thank you in advance.
tinf - http://www.ibsensoftware.com/download.html
Miniz - https://code.google.com/archive/p/miniz/source/default/source
Try piping that raw data to:
perl -MCompress::Zlib -pe 'BEGIN{$i = inflateInit(-WindowBits => -15)}
$_=$i->inflate($_)'
The important part is the -WindowBits => -15 that changes the expected format into a raw one without adler checksum.
(that's derived from the dovecot source, works for me on Thunderbird to gmail network capture).
From RFC4978 that specifies IMAP compression (emphasis mine):
When using the zlib library (see RFC1951), the functions
deflateInit2(), deflate(), inflateInit2(), and inflate() suffice to
implement this extension. The windowBits value must be in the range
-8 to -15, or else deflateInit2() uses the wrong format.
deflateParams() can be used to improve compression rate and resource
use. The Z_FULL_FLUSH argument to deflate() can be used to clear the
dictionary (the receiving peer does not need to do anything).

How to determine length of buffer at client side

I have a server sending a multi-dimensional character array
char buff1[][3] = { {0xff,0xfd,0x18} , {0xff,0xfd,0x1e} , {0xff,0xfd,21} }
In this case the buff1 carries 3 messages (each having 3 characters). There could be multiple instances of buffers on server side with messages of variable length (Note : each message will always have 3 characters). viz
char buff2[][3] = { {0xff,0xfd,0x20},{0xff,0xfd,0x27}}
How should I store the size of these buffers on client side while compiling the code.
The server should send information about the length (and any other structure) of the message with the message as part of the message.
An easy way to do that is to send the number of bytes in the message first, then the bytes in the message. Often you also want to send the version of the protocol (so you can detect mismatches) and maybe even a message id header (so you can send more than one kind of message).
If blazing fast performance isn't the goal (and you are talking over a network interface, which tends to be slower than computers: parsing may be cheap enough that you don't care), using a higher level protocol or format is sometimes a good idea (json, xml, whatever). This also helps with debugging problems, because instead of debugging your custom protocol, you get to debug the higher level format.
Alternatively, you can send some sign that the sequence has terminated. If there is a value that is never a valid sequence element (such as 0,0,0), you could send that to say "no more data". Or you could send each element with a header saying if it is the last element, or the header could say that this element doesn't exist and the last element was the previous one.

Can a false sync word be found in the payload of an MPEG-1/MPEG-2 frame?

I know I can find other answers about this on SO, but I want clarifications from somebody who really knows MPEG-1/MPEG-2 (or MP3, obviously).
The start of an MPEG-1/2 frame is 12 set bits starting at a byte boundary, so bytes ff f*, where * is any nibble. Those 12 bits are called a sync word. This is a useful characteristic to find the start of a frame in any MPEG-1/2 stream.
My first question is: formally, can a false sync word be found or not in the payload of an MPEG-1/2 frame, outside its header?
If so, here's my second question: why does the sync word mechanism even exist then? If we cannot make sure that we found a new frame when reading fff, what is the purpose of this sync word?
Please do not even consider ID3 in your answer; I already know about sync words that can be found in ID3v2 payloads, but that's well documented.
I worked on MPEG-2 streams, more precisely Transport Streams (TS): I guess we can find similarities.
A TS is composed of Transport Packets, which have a header, starting with a sync byte 0x47.
We also can found 0x47 within the payload of the TP, but we know that it is not a sync byte because it is not aligned (TP have a fixed size of 188 bytes).
The sync word gives an entry point to someone that looks at the stream, and allows a program to synchronize his process with the stream, hence the name.
It also allows a fast browsing and parsing of the stream: in a TS you can jump from a packet to another (inspect header, check sync byte, skip 188 bytes and so on)
Finally it is a safety measure that helps you to spot errors (in the stream during transmission for example or in the process if a bug caused a bad alignment)
These argument are about TS but I think the same goes with your case : finding a sync word within a payload should not be an issue because you should always able to distinguish payload and header, most of the time with a length information (either because the size is fixed like in TP or because you have a TLV format).
can a false sync word be found or not in the payload of an MPEG-1/2
frame, outside its header?
According to this, "frame sync can be easily (and very frequently) found in any binary file." See the section titled "MPEG Audio Frame Header"
I confirmed this with an .mp3 song that I chose at random (stripped of ID3 tags). It had 5193 sync words, of which only 4898 were found to be valid (using code too long to be included here).
>>> f = open('notag.mp3', 'rb')
>>> r=f.read()
>>> r.count(b'\xff\xfb')
5193
why does the sync word mechanism even exist then? If we cannot make
sure that we found a new frame when reading fff, what is the purpose
of this sync word?
We can be (relatively) sure if we are checking the rest of the frame header, and not just the sync word. There are bits following the sync which can be used to:
identify a false positive or
give you useful info
With .mp3, you have to use those useful bits to calculate the size of the frame. By skipping ahead <frame-size> bytes before looking for the next sync word, you avoid any false syncs that may be present in the payload. See the section titled "How to calculate frame length" in that same link.

Handling TCP Streams

Our server is seemingly packet based. It is an adaptation from an old serial based system. It has been added, modified, re-built, etc over the years. Since TCP is a stream protocol and not a packet protocol, sometimes the packets get broken up. The ServerSocket is designed in such a way that when the Client sends data, part of the data contains the size of our message such as 55. Sometimes these packets are split into multiple pieces. They arrive in order but since we do not know how the messages will be split, our server sometimes does not know how to identify the split message.
So, having given you the background information. What is the best method to rebuild the packets as they come in if they are split? We are using C++ Builder 5 (yes I know, old IDE but this is all we can work with at the moment. ALOT of work to re-design in .NET or newer technology).
TCP guarantees that the data will arrive in the same order it was sent.
That beeing said, you can just append all the incoming data to a buffer. Then check if your buffer contains one or more packets, and remove them from the buffer, keeping all the remaining data into the buffer for future check.
This, of course, suppose that your packets have some header that indicates the size of the following data.
Lets consider packets have the following structure:
[LEN] X X X...
Where LEN is the size of the data and each X is an byte.
If you receive:
4 X X X
[--1--]
The packet is not complete, you can leave it in the buffer. Then, other data arrives, you just append it to the buffer:
4 X X X X 3 X X X
[---2---]
You then have 2 complete messages that you can easily parse.
If you do it, don't forget to send any length in a host-independant form (ntohs and ntohl can help).
This is often accomplished by prefixing messages with a one or two-byte length value which, like you said, gives the length of the remaining data. If I've understood you correctly, you're sending this as plain text (i.e., '5', '5') and this might get split up. Since you don't know the length of a decimal number, it's somewhat ambiguous. If you absolutely need to go with plain text, perhaps you could encode the length as a 16-bit hex value, i.e.:
00ff <255 bytes data>
000a <10 bytes data>
This way, the length of the size header is fixed to 4 bytes and can be used as a minimum read length when receiving on the socket.
Edit: Perhaps I misunderstood -- if reading the length value isn't a problem, deal with splits by concatenating incoming data to a string, byte buffer, or whatever until its length is equal to the value you read in the beginning. TCP will take care of the rest.
Take extra precautions to make sure that you can't get stuck in a blocking read state should the client not send a complete message. For example, say you receive the length header, and start a loop that keeps reading through blocking recv() calls until the buffer is filled. If a malicious client intentionally stops sending data, your server might be locked until the client either disconnects, or starts sending.
I would have a function called readBytes or something that takes a buffer and a length parameter and reads until that many bytes have been read. You'll need to capture the number of bytes actually read and if it's less than the number you're expecting, advance your buffer pointer and read the rest. Keep looping until you've read them all.
Then call this function once for the header (containing the length), assuming that the header is a fixed length. Once you have the length of the actual data, call this function again.

Progress indication with HTTP file download using WinHTTP

I want to implement an progress bar in my C++ windows application when downloading a file using WinHTTP. Any idea how to do this? It looks as though the WinHttpSetStatusCallback is what I want to use, but I don't see what notification to look for... or how to get the "percent downloaded"...
Help!
Thanks!
Per the docs:
WINHTTP_CALLBACK_STATUS_DATA_AVAILABLE
Data is available to be retrieved with
WinHttpReadData. The
lpvStatusInformation parameter points
to a DWORD that contains the number of
bytes of data available. The
dwStatusInformationLength parameter
itself is 4 (the size of a DWORD).
and
WINHTTP_CALLBACK_STATUS_READ_COMPLETE
Data was successfully read from the
server. The lpvStatusInformation
parameter contains a pointer to the
buffer specified in the call to
WinHttpReadData. The
dwStatusInformationLength parameter
contains the number of bytes read.
There may be other relevant notifications, but these two seem to be the key ones. Getting "percent" is not necessarily trivial because you may not know how much data you're getting (not all downloads have content-length set...); you can get the headers with:
WINHTTP_CALLBACK_STATUS_HEADERS_AVAILABLE
The response header has been received
and is available with
WinHttpQueryHeaders. The
lpvStatusInformation parameter is
NULL.
and if Content-Length IS available then the percentage can be computed by keeping track of the total number of bytes at each "data available" notification, otherwise your guess is as good as mine;-).