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Re: Cisco's Statement about IPR Claimed in draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Thu May 13 13:50:19 2004 
On 13-mei-04, at 19:07, Todd Vierling wrote:
Whereas the Internet-Draft claims, by assuming that both source and dest
ports are knowns, the number of bits required for the attack is 16 (or even
lower) and thus can cause connection resets "even at DSL speed."
Guess what, they call them drafts because they're not finished yet. So why don't you say something to the author?

A 2^[28..33] problem is much more difficult to attack than a 2^[14..16]
problem. It's amazing that such a cheap source of entropy -- randomizing
the source port appropriately -- is being so readily discounted.


(In case you're curious, 2^33 is achievable for things like BGP, where
it's

not certain which end initiated the connection. You get one extra bit
for

the originator choice, on top of a fully randomized 16-bit port and a
16-bit

window size: 2^33.)



I don't think you can fully randomize the source port as it might clash
with well-known ports. Also, it may be somewhat expensive to make ports
truly random. (But not as expensive as doing MD5 for the whole
session.)



But why are you assuming the window size is 64k? This is completely
unnecessary, and not done in practice by "real" routers: those
typically use a 16k window. It should even be possible to set the
window to a very small size, such as 64 bytes. That's enough to receive
the initial BGP header, after which the window can be set to a larger
size until the session is idle again.