Re: tcp vulnerability? haven't seen anything on it here...

From: alex
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 10:33:13 EST


> > > Unless i misunderstood: You need someone/thing to see about 64K
> > > packets within a single flow to make the predicition so the attack
> > > is succesful. Sure to have access to such capability is to be in a
> > > hostile path, no? ;->
> > No, you do not need to see any packet.
> >
>
> Ok, so i misunderstood then. How do you predict the sequences without
> seeing any packet? Is there any URL to mentioned paper?
You don't - just brute-force the tcp 4-tuple and sequence number. The
attack relies on the fact that you don't have to match sequence number
exactly, which cuts down on the search-space. (If total search space is
2^32, rwin is 16k, effective attack search space is 2^32/16k). Multiplied
by number of ephemeral ports, it becomes *feasible* but still not very
likely.

> > Inter-provider BGP is long-lived with close to fixed ports, which is
> > why it has caused quite a stir.
>
> Makes sense. What would be the overall effect though? Route flaps?
Yep.

> > Nevertheless, number of packets to kill the session is still *large*
> > (under "best-case" for attacker, you need to send 2^30 packets)...

-alex

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