Subject: Re: [Mobike] issue 45 - clarifications to security considerations

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 02:33:03 +0200

Jari Arkko wrote:

> Here's another attempt:
>
>   Such an attack could also be defeated by use of negative
>   acknowledgements, such as TCP RST and ICMP errors. However, in
>   our case the victim lacks a valid SA and, as a result, is
>   incapable providing any other negative acknowledgements than
>   ICMP errors. Such errors may be filtered in many networks, and
>   has some denial-of-service issues itself.

Hmm.. here's my take (add this to the end of the section):

   The duration of the attack can also be limited if the victim
   reports the unwanted traffic to the originating IPsec tunnel
   endpoint using ICMP error messages or INVALID_SPI
   notifications. As described in [IKEv2] Section 2.21, this SHOULD
   trigger a liveness test, which also doubles as a return
   routability check if the COOKIE2 notification is included.

And while we're at it, we could also make the 3rd paragraph
(the one referring to [Aura02] and transport layer acks) 
more accurate:

   If the attack is launched by an outsider, the traffic flow would
   normally stop soon due to the lack of responses (such as
   transport layer acknowledgements). However, if the original
   recipient of the flow is malicious, it could maintain the traffic
   flow for an extended period of time, since it often would be able
   to send the required acknowledgements (see [Aura02] for more
   discussion).

Does this look ok?

Best regards,
Pasi
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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 01:34:14 +0200

>   to send the required acknowledgements (see [Aura02] for more
Yes. Thanks.

--Jari

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From: Mohan Parthasarathy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2005 17:52:18 -0800 (PST)

sounds good to me.

-mohan