SCS-C02 Question 271
Select 3Your company has an application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses TCP for communication on port 443. However, during a recent security review, the team identified that some parts of the application could benefit from a faster protocol with lower latency, such as UDP, without impacting the secure transmission of data. Which of the following statements correctly describes how UDP differs from TCP and the associated challenges?
- A
UDP is a stateless protocol, meaning it does not establish a connection before transmitting data.
- B
TCP ensures reliable delivery by using mechanisms like acknowledgments and retransmissions, whereas UDP does not.
- C
UDP is inherently more secure than TCP because it does not establish a connection, reducing the attack surface for potential threats.
- D
Applications using UDP must handle data integrity and retransmission themselves because UDP does not provide these features.
- E
UDP operates at a higher layer of the OSI model than TCP, enabling faster application-layer processing.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B, D
Explanation
UDP differs from TCP in that it is a connectionless, stateless protocol designed for low-latency communication where speed is prioritized over reliability. While this makes UDP faster than TCP, it lacks built-in mechanisms for data integrity, retransmission, and reliable delivery, which must be handled at the application level if needed. Understanding these differences is crucial when choosing protocols for specific use cases in AWS environments.
- A. Correct.
Correct. UDP is a stateless protocol, meaning it does not perform a handshake or maintain connection state, which contributes to its lower latency.
- B. Correct.
Correct. TCP provides reliability through acknowledgments, retransmissions, and flow control, while UDP does not provide these features, making it faster but less reliable.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. UDP is not inherently more secure than TCP; it simply has a different set of use cases. Security depends on the implementation and additional measures like encryption.
- D. Correct.
Correct. Since UDP does not handle data integrity or retransmission, applications using UDP need to implement these features themselves, if required.
- E. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Both UDP and TCP operate at the Transport layer (Layer 4) of the OSI model, so this statement is inaccurate.