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authorDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2014-01-13 20:23:02 +0100
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2014-01-13 20:23:02 +0100
commitc139cd3b43eac8708849755ed14286d0e9d2e589 (patch)
tree4a8093c0dfa1507ce234754a54db8a95399955a4 /net/ipv4/tcp_output.c
parentHHF qdisc: fix jiffies-time conversion. (diff)
parentipv4: introduce hardened ip_no_pmtu_disc mode (diff)
downloadlinux-c139cd3b43eac8708849755ed14286d0e9d2e589.tar.xz
linux-c139cd3b43eac8708849755ed14286d0e9d2e589.zip
Merge branch 'ip_forward_pmtu'
Hannes Frederic Sowa says: ==================== path mtu hardening patches After a lot of back and forth I want to propose these changes regarding path mtu hardening and give an outline why I think this is the best way how to proceed: This set contains the following patches: * ipv4: introduce ip_dst_mtu_maybe_forward and protect forwarding path against pmtu spoofing * ipv6: introduce ip6_dst_mtu_forward and protect forwarding path with it * ipv4: introduce hardened ip_no_pmtu_disc mode The first one switches the forwarding path of IPv4 to use the interface mtu by default and ignore a possible discovered path mtu. It provides a sysctl to switch back to the original behavior (see discussion below). The second patch does the same thing unconditionally for IPv6. I don't provide a knob for IPv6 to switch to original behavior (please see below). The third patch introduces a hardened pmtu mode, where only pmtu information are accepted where the protocol is able to do more stringent checks on the icmp piggyback payload (please see the patch commit msg for further details). Why is this change necessary? First of all, RFC 1191 4. Router specification says: "When a router is unable to forward a datagram because it exceeds the MTU of the next-hop network and its Don't Fragment bit is set, the router is required to return an ICMP Destination Unreachable message to the source of the datagram, with the Code indicating "fragmentation needed and DF set". ..." For some time now fragmentation has been considered problematic, e.g.: * http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-87-3.pdf * http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc4963 Most of them seem to agree that fragmentation should be avoided because of efficiency, data corruption or security concerns. Recently it was shown possible that correctly guessing IP ids could lead to data injection on DNS packets: <https://sites.google.com/site/hayashulman/files/fragmentation-poisoning.pdf> While we can try to completly stop fragmentation on the end host (this is e.g. implemented via IP_PMTUDISC_INTERFACE), we cannot stop fragmentation completly on the forwarding path. On the end host the application has to deal with MTUs and has to choose fallback methods if fragmentation could be an attack vector. This is already the case for most DNS software, where a maximum UDP packet size can be configured. But until recently they had no control over local fragmentation and could thus emit fragmented packets. On the forwarding path we can just try to delay the fragmentation to the last hop where this is really necessary. Current kernel already does that but only because routers don't receive feedback of path mtus, these are only send back to the end host system. But it is possible to maliciously insert path mtu inforamtion via ICMP packets which have an icmp echo_reply payload, because we cannot validate those notifications against local sockets. DHCP clients which establish an any-bound RAW-socket could also start processing unwanted fragmentation-needed packets. Why does IPv4 has a knob to revert to old behavior while IPv6 doesn't? IPv4 does fragmentation on the path while IPv6 does always respond with packet-too-big errors. The interface MTU will always be greater than the path MTU information. So we would discard packets we could actually forward because of malicious information. After this change we would let the hop, which really could not forward the packet, notify the host of this problem. IPv4 allowes fragmentation mid-path. In case someone does use a software which tries to discover such paths and assumes that the kernel is handling the discovered pmtu information automatically. This should be an extremly rare case, but because I could not exclude the possibility this knob is provided. Also this software could insert non-locked mtu information into the kernel. We cannot distinguish that from path mtu information currently. Premature fragmentation could solve some problems in wrongly configured networks, thus this switch is provided. One frag-needed packet could reduce the path mtu down to 522 bytes (route/min_pmtu). Misc: IPv6 neighbor discovery could advertise mtu information for an interface. These information update the ipv6-specific interface mtu and thus get used by the forwarding path. Tunnel and xfrm output path will still honour path mtu and also respond with Packet-too-Big or fragmentation-needed errors if needed. Changelog for all patches: v2) * enabled ip_forward_use_pmtu by default * reworded v3) * disabled ip_forward_use_pmtu by default * reworded v4) * renamed ip_dst_mtu_secure to ip_dst_mtu_maybe_forward * updated changelog accordingly * removed unneeded !!(... & ...) double negations v2) * by default we honour pmtu information 3) * only honor interface mtu * rewritten and simplified * no knob to fall back to old mode any more v2) * reworded Documentation ==================== Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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