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

[David Borman <[e-mail]>]

Klass,

Thanks for the review.

On May 30, 2012, at 10:05 AM, Klaas Wierenga wrote:

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> Hi,
> 
> 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.
> 
> General comments:
> ==================
> 
> This is a short, clear and to the point draft. I have only a few
> general comments
> 
> 1 (introduction)
> - ----------------
> 
> - - Please expand MSS on first use

Agreed.

> 
> - - "(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.
> 
> 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..

> 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.
 
		-David Borman

> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Klaas
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