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Date:      Mon, 23 Apr 2001 10:10:47 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
Cc:        "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, net@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: TCP intercept?
Message-ID:  <20010423101046.A4880@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <3AE3D89D.9ABCA7B6@softweyr.com>; from "Wes Peters" on Mon Apr 23 01:24:13 GMT 2001
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.20.0104230002310.21201-100000@www.everquick.net> <3AE3D89D.9ABCA7B6@softweyr.com>

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In the last episode (Apr 23), Wes Peters said:
> > I'm no kernel hacker, and trying to think of useful little projects
> > to change that. ;-)
> > 
> > AFAIK, FreeBSD lacks support for TCP intercept.  Is anyone already
> > working on this?  Would it be of interest to anyone?  My initial
> > thoughts are that it should be implemented in the same neighborhood
> > as stateful firewall code, as the two are rather closely related.
> 
> If you mean IP forwarding, you can do that with ipnat (part of
> ipfilter) or with natd.  If you mean network interface monitoring,
> see the man page for bpf.  Otherwise, you'll have to explain what you
> mean by "TCP intercept", it is not a terminology in common use.

It's a Cisco term.  From what I can tell, it essentially proxies all
TCP sessions, but solely to shorten the 3-way handshake timeout and trap
SYN floods before the host sees them.  It's useless for protecting
modern systems, but if you have a lot of legacy OSes in your network,
TCP Intercept will protect them all without forcing you to upgrade
them.

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/software/ios120/12cgcr/secur_c/scprt3/scdenial.htm

I don't trust a border router to proxy every TCP session going through
it, though.  Since the router doesn't know the capabilities of the 2nd
host at the time it proxies the connection from the 1st, you can't
negotiate any enhanced TCP features like SACK or rfc1323 (window
scaling or timestamping).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com

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