Re: [tcpm] PoC for draft-moncaster-tcpm-rcv-cheat-02

Hello Caitlin, 

On Wednesday 26 March 2008, Caitlin Bestler wrote:
> I'd rephrase that as:
>
> b) people who believe the attack is practical, but that the problem is
> an
>    application layer problem that should be solved at the application
> layer
>  -- and especially not by transport layer solutions that would have a
>     negative impact on honest connections.

I believe that people that find the above logical do not actually understand 
the issue. Let me explain:

First, it is impossible for the application layer to distinguish legitimate 
clients from this kind of misbehaving receivers.

Second, this has to do with exploiting TCP and not a group of applications.

Third, this affects the network and the end-points and not the applications. 
This means that it has to be solved either in the intermediate network 
(routers) or at the end-point operating systems. 

Forth, it is a security issue that (at least) should be mentioned in 
congestion control related RFCs in the security considerations section.

Since this only affects TCP and the network layer has (almost) nothing to do 
with congestion control, this becomes 100% a transport layer TCP issue. 

Perhaps we should just document this in an informational RFC and cooperate 
with or wait for vendors to solve it.
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