Ably FAQs

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Ably FAQs

Ably architecture, transports, and security

Ably architecture, transports, and security

Details on how Ably works and what makes us reliable and secure

Transports and connections

Why is the Realtime SDK always establishing Comet connections for long polling rather than using it as a fallback for WebSockets?

Which transports are supported?

Which TLS Version does the ably-js library use?

Do you support multiplexing and channel groups?

Connection state recovery

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Security

If I need to whitelist Ably's servers from a firewall, which ports, IPs and/or domains should I add?

Authenticated and identified clients

Are messages sent to and received from Ably securely using TLS?

Token and Basic authentication

How can you restrict which channels a client can access?

Using capabilities to manage client access privileges on channels

When I change a key's capabilities in the dashboard, will existing connections get those capabilities immediately?

Recommendations for incrementally authorising new capabilities

Can a client emulate any client ID i.e. authenticate using a wildcard client ID?

Is it secure to send the access_token as part of the websocket url query params?

For compliance reasons, I need to know how long will Ably store my data for

DOS attack prevention

Cross-platform symmetric encryption offered by the libraries

How do I report a security or privacy vulnerability on Ably

Transport Layer Security (TLS) Version Support

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Protocol support and protocol adapters

Do you support MQTT? Are you protocol agnostic?

What are Ably protocol adapters and how do they work?

Data centres

Where are Ably's servers and datacenters located around the world?

Ably architecture design

Why does Ably have concurrent channel limits?

How is Ably different from Amazon SNS?

How do I avoid hitting the Max Channel Message Rate Limit by sharding messages across channels?