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From: Jiri Bohac <jbohac@suse•cz>
To: Jakob Lell <jakob@jakoblell•com>
Cc: netdev@vger•kernel.org, davem@davemloft•net
Subject: Re: Quick Blind TCP Connection Spoofing with SYN Cookies
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:57:43 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20130815235743.GA25665@midget.suse.cz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <520A3B4A.1050704@jakoblell.com>

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 03:57:30PM +0200, Jakob Lell wrote:
> VIII. Possible mitigation options
> 
> The simplification of TCP Connection Spoofing described here is an
> inherent problem of TCP SYN Cookies and so there won't be a simple
> patch which just solves the issue and makes the Spoofing Attack as
> hard as it is without SYN Cookies. It is only possible to gradually
> increase the required effort for successfully spoofing a connection
> e.g. by only accepting the last two instead of four counter values
> (which will lead to a 60-120s 

If the counter is slowed down 4 times, accepting only two
values should result in similar behaviour as we have today.

Can anyone think of a reason this should not be done?


Additionally, I believe we should reduce the number of possible MSS
values. I think 3 values should be enough - not supporting jumbo
frames and wasting a few bytes on sub-optimal MSS around 1400
bytes should be acceptable when a system is under a DoS attack.

I have 3 patches doing just that:

1 - slow down the timer and improve the situation by a factor of 2
2 - since not everyone will be happy with exactly 3 MSS values,
    let's make this configurable via sysctl
3 - decrease the default number of MSS values to 3 and improve
    the situation by a factor of 8/3

These patches combined make the attack 5.3 times harder. By
using the sysctl to only set two possible MSSs, one can make
the attack 8 times harder - and only 4 times easier than
previously believed.

The patches are compile-tested only.

Thoughts?


-- 
Jiri Bohac <jbohac@suse•cz>
SUSE Labs, SUSE CZ

  parent reply	other threads:[~2013-08-15 23:57 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2013-08-13 13:57 Quick Blind TCP Connection Spoofing with SYN Cookies Jakob Lell
2013-08-14 21:02 ` some one
2013-08-15 23:57 ` Jiri Bohac [this message]
2013-08-16  0:00   ` [PATCH 1/3] [RFC] TCP syncookies: slow down timer to mitigate spoofing attacks Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16  0:34     ` Neal Cardwell
2013-08-16  8:20       ` [PATCH v2 " Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16 21:47     ` [PATCH " Florian Westphal
2013-08-16  0:03   ` [PATCH 2/3] [RFC] TCP syncookies: introduce sysctl to configure the MSS tables Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16 21:40     ` Florian Westphal
2013-08-27 12:55       ` Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16  0:05   ` [PATCH 3/3] [RFC] TCP syncookies: only allow 3 MSS values by default to mitigate spoofing attacks Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16 21:31     ` Florian Westphal
2013-08-27 13:52       ` Jiri Bohac
2013-08-16  9:21   ` Quick Blind TCP Connection Spoofing with SYN Cookies Florian Westphal

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