SMB3 Landscape and Directions

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. In this iteration of the talk, we’ll update the audience on SMB protocol changes as well as improvements to the Windows implementation of the SMB server and client. Added to the SMB protocol is a new server-to-client notification mechanism, which enables a variety of novel use cases. We’ll present the details of protocol messaging (new message types, etc) as well as the one scenario which leverages this new mechanism (server-triggered graceful session closure). In addition to the protocol changes, we’ll provide an overview of the latest feature additions to the Windows SMB server and client: authentication rate limiting to protect against password spray attacks, and upcoming improvements to SMB over QUIC.