RTCIceCandidate: usernameFragment property

A string containing the username fragment (usually referred to in shorthand as "ufrag" or "ice-ufrag") that, along with the ICE password ("ice-pwd"), uniquely identifies a single ongoing ICE interaction, including for any communication with the STUN server. The string may be up to 256 characters long, and has no default value.

At least 24 bits of the text in the ufrag are required to be randomly selected by the ICE layer at the beginning of the ICE session. The specifics for which bits are random and what the remainder of the ufrag text are left up to the browser implementation to decide. For example, a browser might choose to always use a 24-character ufrag in which bit 4 of each character is randomly selected between 0 and 1. Another example: it might take a user-defined string and append three 8-bit random bytes to the end. Or perhaps every character is entirely random.

ICE uses the usernameFragment and password to ensure message integrity. This avoids crosstalk among multiple ongoing ICE sessions, but, more importantly, helps secure ICE transactions (and all of WebRTC by extension) against attacks that might try to inject themselves into an ICE exchange.

The usernameFragment and password both change every time an ICE restart occurs.

Although the WebRTC infrastructure will filter out obsolete candidates for you after an ICE restart, you can do it yourself if you're trying to absolutely minimize the number of messages going back and forth.

To do so, you can compare the value of usernameFragment to the current usernameFragment being used for the connection after receiving the candidate from the signaling server and before calling addIceCandidate() to add it to the set of possible candidates.

When the web app receives a message from the signaling server that includes a candidate to be added to the RTCPeerConnection, you can (and generally should) call addIceCandidate(). There's not typically a need to manually worry about filtering the candidates.

However, let's imagine that we do need to minimize traffic. The function below, ssNewCandidate(), is called when a message, signalMsg, arrives from the signaling server that contains an ICE candidate to be added to the RTCPeerConnection. To avoid including candidates obsoleted by an ICE restart, we can use code like this:

const ssNewCandidate = (signalMsg) => {
  let candidate = new RTCIceCandidate(signalMsg.candidate);
  let receivers = pc.getReceivers();

  for (const receiver of receivers) {
    let parameters = receiver.transport.getParameters();

    if (parameters.usernameFragment === candidate.usernameFragment) {
      return;
    }
  }

  pc.addIceCandidate(candidate).catch(reportError);
};

This walks through the list of the RTCRtpReceiver objects being used to receive ICE data, and looks to see if the usernameFragment indicated in the candidate matches any of them. If it does, ssNewCandidate() aborts. Otherwise, after checking every receiver, it adds the new candidate to the connection.