Network Working Group J. Heffner
Internet-Draft M. Mathis
Expires: July 29, 2007 B. Chandler
PSC
January 25, 2007
IPv4 Reassembly Errors at High Data Rates
draft-heffner-frag-harmful-04
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Abstract
IPv4 fragmentation is not sufficiently robust for use under some
conditions in today's Internet. At high data rates, the 16-bit IP
identification field is not large enough to prevent frequent
incorrectly assembled IP fragments, and the TCP and UDP checksums are
insufficient to prevent the resulting corrupted datagrams from being
delivered to higher protocol layers. This note describes some easily
reproduced experiments demonstrating the problem, and discusses some
Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 of the operational implications of these observations. 1. Introduction The IPv4 header was designed at a time when data rates were several orders of magnitude lower than those achievable today. This document describes a consequent scale-related failure in the IP identification (ID) field, where fragments may be incorrectly assembled at a rate high enough likely to invalidate assumptions about data integrity failure rates. That IP fragmentation results in inefficient use of the network has been well documented [Kent87]. This note presents a different kind of problem, which can result not only in significant performance degradation, but also frequent data corruption. This is especially pertinent due to the recent proliferation of UDP bulk transport tools that sometimes fragment every datagram. Additionally, there is some network equipment that ignores the Don't Fragment (DF) bit in the IP header to work around MTU discovery problems [RFC2923]. This equipment indirectly exposes properly implemented protocols and applications to corrupt data. 2. Wrapping the IP ID Field The Internet Protocol standard specifies: "The choice of the Identifier for a datagram is based on the need to provide a way to uniquely identify the fragments of a particular datagram. The protocol module assembling fragments judges fragments to belong to the same datagram if they have the same source, destination, protocol, and Identifier. Thus, the sender must choose the Identifier to be unique for this source, destination pair and protocol for the time the datagram (or any fragment of it) could be alive in the Internet." [RFC0791] Strict conformance to this standard limits transmissions in one direction between any address pair to no more than 65536 packets per protocol (e.g. TCP, UDP or ICMP) per maximum packet lifetime. Clearly not all hosts follow this standard, because it implies an unreasonably low maximum data rate. For example, a host sending 1500 byte packets with a 30 second maximum packet lifetime could send at only about 26 Mbits/s before exceeding 65535 packets per packet lifetime. Or, filling a 1 Gbit/s interface with 1500 byte packets requires sending 65536 packets in less than 1 second, an unreasonably Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 short maximum packet lifetime, being less than the round-trip time on some paths. This requirement is widely ignored. Additionally, it is worth noting that re-using values in the IP ID field once per 65536 datagrams is the best case. Some implementations randomize the IP ID to prevent leaking information out of the kernel [Bellovin02], which causes re-use of the IP ID field to occur probabilistically at all sending rates. IP receivers store fragments in a reassembly buffer until all fragments in a datagram arrive, or until the reassembly timeout expires (15 seconds is suggested in [RFC0791]). Fragments in a datagram are associated with each other by their protocol number, the value in their ID field, and by the source, destination address pair. If a sender wraps the ID field in less than the reassembly timeout, it becomes possible for fragments from different datagrams to be incorrectly spliced together ("mis-associated"), and delivered to the upper layer protocol. A case of particular concern is when mis-association is self- propagating. This occurs, for example, when there is reliable ordering of packets and the first fragment of a datagram is lost in the network. The rest of the fragments are stored in the fragment reassembly buffer, and when the sender wraps the ID field, the first fragment of the new datagram will be mis-associated with the rest of the old datagram. The new datagram will be now be incomplete (since it is missing its first fragment), so the rest of it will be saved in the fragment reassembly buffer, forming a cycle that repeats every 65536 datagrams. It is possible to have a number of simultaneous cycles, bounded by the size of the fragment reassembly buffer. 3. Harmful Effects of Mis-Associated Fragments When the mis-associated fragments are delivered, transport-layer checksumming should detect these datagrams as incorrect and discard them. When the datagrams are discarded, it could pose a problem for loss-feedback congestion control algorithms since there will be a high number of non-congestion-related losses. However, transport checksums may not be designed to handle such high error rates, either. The TCP/UDP checksum is only 16 bits in length. If these checksums follow a uniform random distribution, we expect mis-associated datagrams to be accepted by the checksum at a rate of one per 65536. With only one mis-association cycle, we expect corrupt data delivered to the application layer once per 2^32 datagrams. This number can be significantly higher with multiple cycles. Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 With non-random data, the TCP/UDP checksum may be even weaker still. It is possible to construct datasets where mis-associated fragments will always have the same checksum. Such a case may be considered unlikely, but is worth considering. "Real" data may be more likely than random data to cause checksum hot spots and increase the probability of false checksum match [Stone98]. Also, some applications or higher-level protocols may turn off checksumming to increase speed, though this practice has been found to be dangerous for other reasons when data reliability is important [Stone00]. 4. Experimental Observations To test the practical impact of fragmentation on UDP, we ran a series of experiments using a UDP bulk data transport protocol that was designed to be used as an alternative to TCP for transporting large data sets over specialized networks. The tool, Reliable Blast UDP (RBUDP), part of the QUANTA networking toolkit [QUANTA], was selected because it has a clean interface which facilitated automated experiments. The decision to use RBUDP had little to do with the details of the transport protocol itself. Any UDP transport protocol that does not have additional means to detect corruption, and that could be configured to use IP fragmentation, would have the same results. In order to diagnose corruption on files transferred with the UDP bulk transfer tool, we used a file format that included embedded sequence numbers and MD5 checksums in each fragment of each datagram. Thus it was possible to distinguish random corruption from that caused by mis-associated fragments. We used two different types of files. One was constructed so that all the UDP checksums were constant -- we will call this the "constant" dataset. The other was constructed so that UDP checksums were uniformly random -- the "random" dataset. All tests were done using 400 MB files, sent in 1524-byte datagrams so that they were fragmented on standard Fast Ethernet with a 1500-byte MTU. The UDP bulk file transport tool was used to send the datasets between a pair of hosts at slightly less than the available data rate (100 Mbps). Near the beginning of each flow, a brief secondary flow was started to induce packet loss in the primary flow. Throughout the life of the primary flow, we typically observed mis-association rates on the order of a few hundredths of a percent. Tests run with the "constant" dataset resulted in corruption on all mis-associated fragments, that is, corruption on the order of a few hundredths of a percent. In sending approximately 10 TB of "random" datasets, we observed 8847668 UDP checksum errors and 121 corruptions Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 of the data due to mis-associated fragments. 5. Implications Most TCP implementations today participate in MTU discovery [RFC1191], which will avoid the problems described in this note by avoiding IP fragmentation altogether. However, as a work-around for MTU discovery problems [RFC2923], some TCP implementations and communications gear provide mechanisms to disable path MTU discovery by clearing or ignoring the DF bit. Doing so will expose all protocols using IPv4, even those that participate in MTU discovery, to mis-association errors. A case particularly worth noting is that of tunnels encapsulating payload in IPv4. To deal with difficulties in MTU Discovery [RFC4459], tunnels may rely on fragmentation between the two endpoints, even if the payload is marked with a DF bit [RFC4301]. In such a mode, the two tunnel endpoints behave as IP end hosts, with all tunneled traffic having the same protocol type. Thus, the aggregate rate of tunneled packets may not exceed 65536 per maximum packet lifetime, or tunneled data becomes exposed to possible mis- association. Even protocols doing MTU discovery such as TCP will be affected. IPv6 is less vulnerable to this type of problem, since its fragment header contains a 32-bit identification field [RFC2460]. Mis- association will only be a problem at packet rates 65536 times higher than for IPv4. Since mis-association of fragments will only occur when the IP ID field is wrapped within the fragment reassembly timeout, it may be possible to reduce the timeout sufficiently so that mis-association will not occur. However, there are a number of difficulties with such an approach. Since the sender controls the rate of packets sent and selection of IP ID, while the receiver controls the reassembly timeout, there would need to be some mutual assurance between each party as to participation in the scheme. Further, it is not generally possible to set the timeout low enough so that a fast sender's fragments will not be mis-associated, yet high enough so that a slow sender's fragments will not be unconditionally discarded before it is possible to reassemble them. So the timeout and IP ID selection would need to be done on a per peer basis. Also, it is likely NAT will break any per peer tables keyed by IP address. It is not within the scope of this document to recommend solutions to these problems. Another means of solving the corruption issue is to add stronger Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 integrity checking, which can be done at any layer above IP. This is a natural side effect of using cryptographic authentication. If IPsec AH [RFC2402] is in use, the mis-associated fragments will be discarded at the network layer with extremely high probability. Some higher layers may use longer checksums (for example, SCTP's is 32 bits in length [RFC2960]) or cryptographic authentication (SSH message authentication codes [RFC4251]). While stronger integrity checking may prevent data corruption, it will not solve the problem of a high effective loss rate. In the case of SSH, any stream corruption results in immediate termination of the connection. It is difficult to concisely describe all possible situations under which fragments might be mis-associated. Even if an end host carefully follows the specification, ensuring unique IP IDs, the presence of NATs or tunnels may expose applications to IP ID space conflicts. A fragmenting application that sends at a low rate might possibly be exposed when running simultaneously with a non- fragmenting application that sends at a high rate. There are some possible work-arounds that receivers might implement to reduce the possibility of conflict, but there is no mechanism in place for a sender to know what the receiver is doing in this respect. As a consequence, there is no general mechanism for an application that is using IPv4 fragmentation to know if it is deterministically or statistically protected from mis-associated fragments. In general, applications that rely on IPv4 fragmentation should be written with these issues in mind, as well as those issues documented in [Kent87]. Applications that rely on IPv4 fragmentation while sending at high speeds, and devices that deliberately introduce fragmentation to otherwise unfragmented traffic (e.g., tunnels) should be particularly cautious, and introduce strong mechanisms to ensure data integrity. 6. Security Considerations If a malicious entity knows that a pair of hosts are communicating using a fragmented stream, it may present an opportunity for this entity to corrupt the flow. By sending "high" fragments (those with offset greater than zero) with a forged source address, the attacker can deliberately cause corruption as described above. Exploiting this vulnerability requires only knowledge of the source and destination addresses of the flow, its protocol number, and fragment boundaries. It does not require knowledge of port or sequence numbers. If the attacker has visibility of packets on the path, the attack profile is similar to injecting full segments. Using this attack Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 makes blind disruptions easier, and might possibly be used to cause degradation of service. We believe only streams using IPv4 fragmentation are likely vulnerable. Because of the nature of the problems outlined in this draft, the use of IPv4 fragmentation for critical applications may not be advisable regardless of security concerns. 7. IANA Considerations None. 8. Informative References [Kent87] Kent, C. and J. Mogul, "Fragmentation considered harmful", Proc. SIGCOMM '87 vol. 17, No. 5, October 1987. [RFC2923] Lahey, K., "TCP Problems with Path MTU Discovery", RFC 2923, September 2000. [RFC0791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791, September 1981. [RFC1191] Mogul, J. and S. Deering, "Path MTU discovery", RFC 1191, November 1990. [Stone98] Stone, J., Greenwald, M., Partridge, C., and J. Hughes, "Performance of Checksums and CRC's over Real Data", IEEE/ ACM Transactions on Networking vol. 6, No. 5, October 1998. [Stone00] Stone, J. and C. Partridge, "When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree", Proc. SIGCOMM 2000 vol. 30, No. 4, October 2000. [QUANTA] He, E., Alimohideen, J., Eliason, J., Krishnaprasad, N., Leigh, J., Yu, O., and T. DeFanti, "Quanta: a toolkit for high performance data delivery over photonic networks", Future Generation Computer Systems Vol. 19, No. 6, August 2003. [Bellovin02] Bellovin, S., "A Technique for Counting NATted Hosts", November 2002. [RFC2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998. Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 [RFC2960] Stewart, R., Xie, Q., Morneault, K., Sharp, C., Schwarzbauer, H., Taylor, T., Rytina, I., Kalla, M., Zhang, L., and V. Paxson, "Stream Control Transmission Protocol", RFC 2960, October 2000. [RFC2402] Kent, S. and R. Atkinson, "IP Authentication Header", RFC 2402, November 1998. [RFC4251] Ylonen, T. and C. Lonvick, "The Secure Shell (SSH) Protocol Architecture", RFC 4251, January 2006. [RFC4301] Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005. [RFC4459] Savola, P., "MTU and Fragmentation Issues with In-the- Network Tunneling", RFC 4459, April 2006. Appendix A. Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0083285. Authors' Addresses John W. Heffner Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 4400 Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 US Phone: 412-268-2329 Email: jheffner@psc.edu Matt Mathis Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 4400 Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 US Phone: 412-268-3319 Email: mathis@psc.edu Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 Ben Chandler Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center 4400 Fifth Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 US Phone: 412-268-9783 Email: bchandle@psc.edu Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft Reassembly Errors January 2007 Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. This document and the information contained herein are provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY, THE IETF TRUST AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Intellectual Property The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has made any independent effort to identify any such rights. Information on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be found in BCP 78 and BCP 79. Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at http://www.ietf.org/ipr. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement this standard. Please address the information to the IETF at ietf-ipr@ietf.org. Acknowledgment Funding for the RFC Editor function is provided by the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA). Heffner, et al. Expires July 29, 2007 [Page 10]
Datatracker
draft-heffner-frag-harmful-04
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 4963.
