13 Facts About SMB protocol

Microsoft has since discontinued use of the CIFS moniker but continues developing SMB protocol and making subsequent specifications publicly available.

SMB protocol serves as the basis for Microsoft's Distributed File System implementation.

Use of the SMB protocol has often correlated with a significant increase in broadcast traffic on a network.

One approach to mitigating the inefficiencies in the SMB protocol is to use WAN optimization products such as those provided by Riverbed, Silver Peak, or Cisco.

SMB protocol1 has a compounding mechanism—known as AndX—to compound multiple actions, but Microsoft clients rarely use AndX.

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The SMB1 protocol uses 16-bit data sizes, which amongst other things, limits the maximum block size to 64K.

SMB protocol2 uses 32- or 64-bit wide storage fields, and 128 bits in the case of file-handles, thereby removing previous constraints on block sizes, which improves performance with large file transfers over fast networks.

SMB protocol1 continues in use for connections with older versions of Windows, as well various vendors' NAS solutions.

Specifications for the SMB are proprietary and were initially closed, thereby forcing other vendors and projects to reverse-engineer the protocol to interoperate with it.

NSMB protocol is a family of in-kernel SMB protocol client and server implementations in BSD operating systems.

MacOS version of NSMB protocol is notable for its now-common scheme of representing symlinks.

MoSMB protocol is a proprietary SMB protocol implementation for Linux and other Unix-like systems, developed by Ryussi Technologies.

Real-time attack tracking shows that SMB protocol is one of the primary attack vectors for intrusion attempts, for example the 2014 Sony Pictures attack, and the WannaCry ransomware attack of 2017.