RE: [PATCH net 6/7] tcp: increase source port perturb table to 2^16

From: David Laight
Date: Wed Apr 27 2022 - 04:07:40 EST


From: Willy Tarreau
> Sent: 27 April 2022 07:53
>
> Moshe Kol, Amit Klein, and Yossi Gilad reported being able to accurately
> identify a client by forcing it to emit only 40 times more connections
> than there are entries in the table_perturb[] table. The previous two
> improvements consisting in resalting the secret every 10s and adding
> randomness to each port selection only slightly improved the situation,
> and the current value of 2^8 was too small as it's not very difficult
> to make a client emit 10k connections in less than 10 seconds.
>
> Thus we're increasing the perturb table from 2^8 to 2^16 so that the the
> same precision now requires 2.6M connections, which is more difficult in
> this time frame and harder to hide as a background activity. The impact
> is that the table now uses 256 kB instead of 1 kB, which could mostly
> affect devices making frequent outgoing connections. However such
> components usually target a small set of destinations (load balancers,
> database clients, perf assessment tools), and in practice only a few
> entries will be visited, like before.

Increasing the table size has a bigger impact on anyone trying
to get the kernel to run in a limited memory footprint.

All these large tables (often hash tables) soon add up.

David

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