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Date:      Sat, 22 Jan 2000 08:31:02 -0700
From:      Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
To:        gdonl@tsc.tdk.com (Don Lewis), Keith Stevenson <k.stevenson@louisville.edu>, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Some observations on stream.c and streamnt.c
Message-ID:  <4.2.2.20000122082128.01999ef0@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <200001220955.BAA16447@salsa.gv.tsc.tdk.com>
References:  <Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>

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At 02:55 AM 1/22/2000 , Don Lewis wrote:

>If you attack a destination port that doesn't have a listening socket (or
>you attack random ports, most of which won't have listening sockets, inp
>will be NULL and the above code will be invoked.  ICMP_BANDLIM will keep
>the code from falling through to dropwithreset the vast majority of the
>time, saving your bacon.

Yep. Right now, ICMP_BANDLIM is actually limiting RSTs as well
as ICMP packets. I have not seen Matt's patch yet, but would like
to see the two separated.

>Does anyone else think that the order of the above three tests is exactly
>backwards?  This attack will really DoS the machine if you have log_in_vain
>turned on.

I've always thought that log_in_vain should either have or trigger
a mechanism like the "repeat detector" in syslogd. As a sysadmin,
I'd like it to have its own output limiting mechanism so that it can give 
me an intelligent summary of an attack rather than "Last message repeated
1000 times."

>If the attack is directed against a port with a listening socket, then
>the above code is not invoked and the branch to dropwithreset happens
>further down in the code at a place no protected by ICMP_BANDLIM.

That's part of the fallout of letting an ACK match a listening
socket. In your patch (and thank you, by the way; I was going to
generate one a lot like it but would have had to CVSup a machine
to -CURRENT first!), you've fixed this problem.

--Brett




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