Re: [Spud] [Privsec-program] Detecting and Defeating TCP/IP Hypercookie Attacks

Tom Herbert <tom@herbertland.com> Sat, 30 July 2016 19:59 UTC

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From: Tom Herbert <tom@herbertland.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 12:59:54 -0700
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To: Stephan Neuhaus <sten@artdecode.de>
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Cc: Brian Trammell <ietf@trammell.ch>, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>, Mirja Kühlewind <mirja.kuehlewind@tik.ee.ethz.ch>, spud <spud@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [Spud] [Privsec-program] Detecting and Defeating TCP/IP Hypercookie Attacks
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On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Stephan Neuhaus <sten@artdecode.de> wrote:
> On 2016-07-30 19:21, Tom Herbert wrote:
>> I this is very debatable. The reason we want to encrypt the transport
>> layer in the first place seems to get easily lost in these
>> discussions; it is to hide transport layer information *from* the
>> network. This prevents intrusiveness of the network in transport
>> layers, stops middleboxes from trying to actively participate in
>> transport layer protocols, and thus resolves one major source of
>> protocol ossification and gets us back to the E2E model.
>
> PLUS offers mostly fields that are set by the endpoints and that are
> protected by MACs, so the can't be changed by middleboxes, at least not
> without the endpoint finding out. (There are a few fields that are
> supposed to enable signaling from the path to the endpoint(s) and these
> obviously need to be changeable by the middleboxes. These will be things
> such as "tell me the path MTU".)
>
> The PLUS fields will be stuff like "this packet starts a new flow", or
> "this packet ends a flow", and the read-only nature of these fields
> (unlike what we have now) means that middleboxes can not intrude, and
> they can't actively participate. This is exactly what you want, isn't it?
>
No, it's not. In fact, exposing flow start/stop information is a good
example of something that facilitates intrusiveness by middleboxes at
the transport layer.

The purpose of exposing this information is to allow network devices
to track connections, but connection tracking in the network is
fundamentally flawed since there is no requirement that all packets of
a connection go any single network device (i.e. the Internet is packet
switched not circuit switched). It is therefore incorrect for a
middlebox to assume that it can maintain correct connection state for
any connections. This becomes intrusive when the middlebox makes
decisions based on imperfect state that affects the connection, for
instance when a firewall drops packets for a legitimate established
connection but doesn't have state since it was not in the path of the
SYN.

Thanks,
Tom