Unfortunately, I haven't had time to read through the paper, and only got through the first few pages. From what I see though, the point of the attack is to punch through by using the improper handling of the split handshake by a client, which apparently fools some firewalls. For this to happen, you would only need to get a client to open a tcp connection to your malicious server, which is trivial. I'll have to take a closer look at the paper later on to to give more detail though. Hopefully someone else will chime in in the meantime.
And, from the Macrothink paper, it looks like it's not so much "open an inbound connection through the firewall" as "trick the firewall into not scanning the payload". Not relevant for, say, home routers that don't do scanning in the first place.
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Unfortunately, I haven't had time to read through the paper, and only got through the first few pages. From what I see though, the point of the attack is to punch through by using the improper handling of the split handshake by a client, which apparently fools some firewalls. For this to happen, you would only need to get a client to open a tcp connection to your malicious server, which is trivial. I'll have to take a closer look at the paper later on to to give more detail though. Hopefully someone else will chime in in the meantime.
And, from the Macrothink paper, it looks like it's not so much "open an inbound connection through the firewall" as "trick the firewall into not scanning the payload". Not relevant for, say, home routers that don't do scanning in the first place.