Re: [secdir] SecDir review of draft-ietf-nsis-tunnel-11

[Charles Shen <[e-mail]>]

Hi Yaron, I have just submitted a revised version. please take a look
and let me know if you have any further comments.

Thanks again.

Charles




On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:13 AM, Yaron Sheffer <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
> I have been assigned your draft for a secdir re-review. The draft has not
> been revised since my last review, so I will just reiterate: I recommend
> that the Security Considerations be improved before the document goes into
> IESG telechat.
>
> Thanks,
>        Yaron
>
> On 06/21/2010 06:15 PM, Charles Shen wrote:
>>
>> Thanks Yaron, please see inline.
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 7:46 AM, Yaron Sheffer<[e-mail]>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> [Removed the IESG.]
>>>
>>> Hi Charles,
>>>
>>> please see my comments inline.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>    Yaron
>>>
>>> On 06/20/2010 06:52 AM, Charles Shen wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hi Yaron, thank you for your careful review. Please see comments inline.
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 3:58 AM, Yaron Sheffer<[e-mail]>
>>>>  wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's
>>>>> ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the
>>>>> IESG.
>>>>> These comments were written primarily for the benefit of the security
>>>>> area directors.  Document editors and WG chairs should treat these
>>>>> comments just like any other last call comments.
>>>>>
>>>>> This draft discusses the problem of NSIS messages (particularly, QoS
>>>>> reservation flows) being encapsulated into various IP tunneling
>>>>> protocols,
>>>>> which prevent the correct QoS setup from being performed. The draft
>>>>> proposes
>>>>> a solution for NSIS tunnel-aware tunnel endpoints, which basically adds
>>>>> an
>>>>> NSIS signaling flow between the tunnel endpoints, but outside of the
>>>>> tunnel.
>>>>>
>>>>> General
>>>>>
>>>>> The draft presents the problem, and the solution, reasonably well.
>>>>>
>>>>> The draft goes for the "no new security issues" approach. I think this
>>>>> is
>>>>> incorrect, and in fact a number of security issues should be analyzed
>>>>> and
>>>>> possibly resolved. In addition, as a complete outsider to NSIS, I have
>>>>> identified one major unspecified piece, leading me to believe that the
>>>>> draft
>>>>> has not had enough review.
>>>>>
>>>>> Security
>>>>>
>>>>> The main security issue is that the draft fails to consider
>>>>> security-oriented tunnels. IPsec tunnels (and the commonly used
>>>>> GRE-over-IPsec) provide security services: normally encryption and
>>>>> integrity
>>>>> protection with ESP, less commonly integrity-protection only with AH,
>>>>> ESP
>>>>> with null encryption, or the new WESP (RFC 5840). The proposed solution
>>>>> raises at least three major security issues related to these tunnels:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1. A so-called covert channel that results from NSIS flows in the
>>>>> protected
>>>>> networks directly triggering NSIS protocol exchanges in an unprotected
>>>>> network (i.e. between the tunnel endpoints). Please see Appendix B.1 of
>>>>> draft-ietf-tsvwg-ecn-tunnel-08 for treatment of a similar issue.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> With regard to this specific draft, I see the problem as a more
>>>> generic issue which exists also for other protocols (e.g., RSVP)
>>>> requiring per-hop processing to interact with IPSec. E.g., RFC4302
>>>> mentions that "NOTE: Use of the Router Alert option is potentially
>>>> incompatible with use of IPsec. Although the option is immutable, its
>>>> use implies that each router along a packet's path will "process" the
>>>> packet and consequently might change the packet.". I think that
>>>> mentioning of this potential incompatibility will be beneficial. But I
>>>> don't quite see how "limiting the bandwidth of the covert channel" as
>>>> discussed in Appendix B.1 of draft-ietf-tsvwg-ecn-tunnel-08 can be
>>>> applied here. Please correct me if I were wrong.
>>>>
>>> You can say this solution is incompatible with IPsec and be done with it.
>>> Otherwise, there is a "covert channel
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel>" - someone can create
>>> spurious
>>> NSIS signaling flows within the protected network, just to create
>>> signaling
>>> in the outside network, which then someone else is monitoring. For highly
>>> secure networks, this would be seen as a way to smuggle information out
>>> of
>>> the network, and you would want to rate-limit this channel.
>>>>
>>
>> That makes sense. My understanding is that the rate-limit does not
>> complete solve the problem, but does reduce the potential harm.
>>
>>
>>>>> 2. A more serious interaction in the other direction: unprotected NSIS
>>>>> flows
>>>>> outside the tunnel interact with NSIS flows in the protected networks
>>>>> and
>>>>> inside the tunnel, and so, an attacker in the unprotected network can
>>>>> possibly influence QoS behavior in protected networks.
>>>>>
>>>>> 3. A practical result of (2) is that the NSIS protocol stack on the
>>>>> tunnel
>>>>> endpoint is now exposed to unprotected networks and therefore suddenly
>>>>> becomes security-critical.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> IMHO, if we have a segment of the path which is compromised, the QoS
>>>> of the rest of the path segments (and the end-to-end QoS) can be
>>>> easily affected anyway, whether you have a tunnel segment in the path
>>>> or not. Therefore, it doesn't seem to me as a new threat introduced by
>>>> this document per se. But it will certainly also be helpful to mention
>>>> this scenario in the security considerations section.
>>>
>>> What I'm saying in #3 is that any security vulnerability (e.g. buffer
>>> overflow) in the NSIS stack is suddenly exposed to the big bad Internet,
>>> even when the customer may have expected all their traffic to be
>>> protected
>>> by a VPN gateway, where the VPN software is normally the only software
>>> that
>>> needs to be hardened.
>>
>> I agree. What I had been thinking is that compromise of other nodes
>> (non-tunnel end-points) may similarly affect end-to-end QoS signaling,
>> even if the end-to-end path includes a secure tunnel.
>>
>>>>
>>>>> Non-Security
>>>>>
>>>>> The draft defines extra UDP encapsulation in some cases ("the tunnel
>>>>> entry-point inserts an additional UDP header"), but the format
>>>>> (specifically, the port number) is not specified. This omission is
>>>>> strange,
>>>>> because the protocol cannot be implemented in the absence of this
>>>>> information!
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> To me this is an intended feature. The mechanism does not require a
>>>> pre-allocated fixed UDP port, but allows the port to be dynamically
>>>> chosen and conveyed during the tunnel flow/session binding operations.
>>>>
>>> Sure, I missed this point. Can you please mention it explicitly.
>>>
>>
>> Sure!
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Charles
>