Re: [tcpinc] WGLC for draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpcrypt - draft header

Daniel B Giffin <dbg@scs.stanford.edu> Thu, 16 February 2017 02:19 UTC

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Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:19:40 -0800
From: Daniel B Giffin <dbg@scs.stanford.edu>
To: "Black, David" <David.Black@dell.com>
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Cc: tcpinc <tcpinc@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [tcpinc] WGLC for draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpcrypt - draft header
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Sorry for the oversight on the document category!  I've
submitted a new draft labeled Experimental.

In the new draft (-05) I've also changed the denial-of-
service discussion slightly to make clear that there is no
special vulnerability of tcpcrypt above what TCP suffers:

   To gain middlebox compatibility, tcpcrypt does not protect TCP
   headers.  Hence, the protocol is vulnerable to denial-of-service from
   off-path attackers just as plain TCP is.  Possible attacks include
   desynchronizing the underlying TCP stream, injecting RST or FIN
   segments, and forging rekey bits.  These attacks will cause a
   tcpcrypt connection to hang or fail with an error, but not in any
   circumstance where plain TCP could continue uncorrupted.
   Implementations MUST give higher-level software a way to distinguish
   such errors from a clean end-of-stream (indicated by an authenticated
   "FINp" bit) so that applications can avoid semantic truncation
   attacks.

I didn't mention on-path attackers because it should be
clear that they have arbitrary DOS capability.

Thanks for the suggestion.

daniel