Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpmss-04

["Klaas Wierenga (kwiereng)" <[e-mail]>]

David,

Your suggestion looks fine to me!

Klaas

Sent from my iPad

On 30 mei 2012, at 20:20, "David Borman" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Klaas,
> 
> On May 30, 2012, at 12:39 PM, Klaas Wierenga (kwiereng) wrote:
>> On 30 mei 2012, at 19:29, "David Borman" <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> On May 30, 2012, at 10:05 AM, Klaas Wierenga wrote:
> ...
>>>> - - "(see appendix A)" and "but there still seems to be some confusion"
>>>> 
>>>> This sounds pretty vague to me. I thought Appendix A would be a
>>>> verbatim copy of the text from 1122, but it is much more, and I
>>>> appreciated the discussion. I propose to make that explicit:
>>>> 
>>>> "RFC1122 clarified the MSS option, but confusion remains as discussed
>>>> in Appendix A"
>>> 
>>> I've changed it to:
>>> RFC 1122 [RFC1122] clarified the MSS
>>> option, which is discussed in Appendix A, but there still seems to be
>>> some confusion.
>> 
>> 
>> Ah, I thought you had listed all confusion in appendix A. Since that does not seem to be the case, can you say anything about the nature of the remaining confusion?
> 
> How about:
>    RFC 1122 [RFC1122] clarified the MSS option, which is discussed in
>    Appendix A, but because it didn't explicitly state how options
>    should be handled, there still seems to be some confusion.
> 
>>>> Security Considerations:
>>>> ========================
>>>> I don't really think what you have written down here qualifies as
>>>> security considerations. It sort of hints to a denial-of-service, but
>>>> I don't see any evil, just an operational problem.
>>> 
>>> Another review said more or less the same thing..
>> 
>> Great minds..... ;-)
>> 
>>> 
>>>> What I wonder about
>>>> (but I am not knowledgable to judge) is whether wrong MSS size
>>>> settings could be exploited for for example buffer overflow attacks.
>>> 
>>> There shouldn't be any problem.  The MSS is just an upper bound
>>> for the size of packets that can be reassembled by the receiving
>>> hosts; in theory most IPv4 hosts should be using 65535 because they
>>> don't have a fixed limit, and then just let Path MTU discovery sort
>>> it out.  In practice, though, the MSS is used as an upper bound for what
>>> size of packet can be received without the need for fragmentation,
>>> avoiding PMTU from probing for larger sizes that will never succeed.
>>> 
>>> I don't have a strong opinion about the current content of the
>>> Security Considerations section.  My leaning is to just leave it
>>> as is, but I'd be fine with moving the content up to section 5.4
>>> as an "Additional Consideration", and then have section 6, "Security
>>> Considerations" just have a comment that there are no security
>>> considerations, if folks generally feel that would be better.
>> 
>> I don't feel comfortable with a security consideration that isn't, so I would lean towards your alternative proposal.
> 
> Ok, I'll move the content to section 5, and leave "Security Considerations"
> empty, unless someone else objects to making that change.
> 
>            -David Borman
> 
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