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Comment by fredliu | Hacker News Reader

* DTLS : This lets it talk to WebRTC clients

Could you elaborate more on this? I don't know much about erlang/OTP's support for WebRTC. Does adding DTLS makes erlang/OTP possible to talk to WebRTC clients because WebRTC requires DTLS? or this means erlang/OTP now has a complete stack and API for WebRTC communication out of the box?

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DTLS is TLS (SSL) but for datagrams (UDP) instead of the traditional streams (TCP).

WebRTC uses DTLS as one of its base protocols. The other one is SRTP but even its setup requires DTLS.

I am not sure how complete the rest of the support it but having DTLS is a major step ahead.

Thanks for the clarification. I was aware of the DTLS requirement for WebRTC, but not sure the whole WebRTC stack support on erlang/OTP. Now thinking about it, maybe an erlang/elixir/whatever-on-BEAM implementation of STUN/TURN server would make sense...

I thought that the STUN/TURN stuff was just for discovery and used fairly conventional protocols...Isn't the DTLS for actual media transmission - i.e. directly between clients (or via some kind of Gateway?)

STUN is for signaling, but the hole-punching business is not 100% guaranteed to work, so you need TURN as the back up relay server. DTLS is needed for both p2p traffic and the replaying traffic through TURN, so your TURN server does need DTLS for its job.

STUN/TURN are just NAT traversal, they are building blocks in WebRTC signaling.

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