Re: [tcpm] tcpsecure recommendations

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Anantha Ramaiah (ananth) wrote:
|> #3 makes most sense tm oe. #1 weakens the AS statement too
|> much, and
|> #2 covers data plane protection that there are too
|> many other ways to spoof (overwriting segments, or just
|> writing segments with predicted header data). This appears to
|> be best applied to an unauthenticated control plane.
|
| I am assuming you are characterizing the reception of certain segments
| like SYN/RST/FIN as control plane and pure data as otherwise?. Pl note
| that tcp-secure mainly talks about injecting a bad segment which
| eventually results in tearing down an established TCP connection. In
| other words, I can't understand your reasoning for not going with #2.
| What do you think are the issues going with #2 ?
|
| Can you elaborate?

The key issues are:

- - lack of protection against injected data itself (I'm not sure if the
doc actually calls this out specifically; it probably should in the
security considerations section - even an off-path attacker can do this,
e.g.)

- - the word "eventually" above

IMO, if you are running a TCP connection that is susceptible to attacks
only by a *stream* of forged segments, you probably ought to use
something besides TCP-secure as protection.

As a result, I think that you SHOULD protect the control plane (if you
employ this technique), but that protection of attacks via data plane
volume are not as critical, and thus a MAY.

Joe
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