Re: [tcpm] [OPSEC] draft-gont-tcp-security

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Donald,

I'm confused by your post. You appear to believe that TCP is intended to
be secure. Note that TCP does not require either the MD5 or AO extension.

Smith, Donald wrote:
> 
> (coffee != sleep) & (!coffee == sleep)
> [e-mail] gcia   
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] 
>> On Behalf Of Fernando Gont
>> Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 1:23 PM
>> To: Joe Touch
>> Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; Joe Abley; [e-mail]; 
>> Lars Eggert; Eddy,Wesley M. (GRC-RCN0)[Verizon]
>> Subject: Re: [OPSEC] [tcpm] draft-gont-tcp-security
>>
>> Joe Touch wrote:
>>
>>>> So we had tcp-secure in 2004, icmp-attacks in 2005, a claim for a
>>>> trivial attack in 2008 (Outpost24/CERT-FI), and we'll 
>> probably continue
>>>> in this line, because we do nothing about it.
>>> Whether we have this document or not, we will continue to 
>> have people
>>> who incorrectly assume that TCP is secure.
> 
> Secure is a general term. TCP was intended to address several areas of security.
> The classic tenets for computer security is:
> CIA -> Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.
> TCP doesn't attempt to address Confidentiality.
> However it was designed to address integrity and availability so 
> failures in those areas should be documented and addressed in some
> fashion.

Can you explain this? Where is the integrity protection? Where is the
availability specified?

...
>> It's security/resiliency can be improved. After all, if that were not
>> the case, I guess you're wasting your time with TCP-AO. Or is it that
>> you believe the only way to improve a protocol is to throw 
>> crypto at it?
> 
> Adding crypto improves confidentiality and integrity but is counter
> productive to availability as most
> crypto engines are prone to fairly low pps resource exhaustion
> attacks.

All prevention methods are susceptible to computational resource
attacks, since all increase the operations performed on a packet. It is
commonly assumed that this is a desirable tradeoff, and that the
computational resources can be totally protected with line-rate
dedicated computation (e.g., hardware assist).

Joe
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAknjqdYACgkQE5f5cImnZruhawCgqqkl3NPljMkNRz8buEYROGUO
R2kAnRHhQmWJVtXq/j2wbNy64q6QWe+u
=OkiS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----