# RNS 1.5.0 - Protocol Violation Control

_General · started by Mark on Fri, Aug 21, 2026 3:14 PM_

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## Original post

**Mark** · Fri, Aug 21, 2026 3:14 PM

The upcoming release of RNS 1.5.0 will introduce per-interface protocol violation tracking and control. This means, that going forward, it will be a lot easier to handle broken implementations and clients doing things that no sane implementation would do. For example, protocol violations include:

- Sending announces that are cryptographically invalid
- Forwarding meaningless link requests
- Transporting completely malformed packets
- Ignoring negotiated link MTUs
- Dumping random data at 35 Mbps to bogus links
- And all kinds of other "fun", but meaningless stuff

This will also make testing things much easier, since protocol violation stats can be viewed live per interface with `rnstatus`.

Since nothing is perfect, and there's bound to be both some false hits and missed cases initially, the actual *control* part of this will not be enabled by default in 1.5.0. But if everything works out nicely, it will be the default behavior (on interface types where this makes sense, `BackboneInterface` for example) from 1.5.1 to instantly tear down excessively violating clients, and potentially block their IP for a period of time. All configurable of course, so you decide how to use this.

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## Reply 1

**Mark** · Fri, Aug 21, 2026 3:36 PM

And while RNS itself does correctly drop packets with invalid hop counts if received, before 1.5.0, it does actually allow constructing and *sending* them, so I'm officially the OG Protocol Violator here ;)

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