Re: Ambiguities in TCP/IP - firewall bypassing

[Tony Finch <dot () dotat at>]

Alun Jones <alun () texis com> wrote:
> Not necessarily.  Have you heard of T/TCP?  Before that was around, I 
> remember hearing discussion of using a packet with SYN, FIN, and data all 
> in one, to cut down on round-trips in really short communications, while 
> still providing reliability.

One of the problems with T/TCP on the wider Internet is that it is almost
as vulnerable to source address spoofing as UDP, so security facilities
like those provided by tcp_wrappers (and built in to many daemons) are
no longer so effective. With vanilla TCP, the T/TCP combination of SYN+
data+FIN isn't useful, because the passive end should discard data that
arrives before the handshake is completed in order to preserve its spoof-
resistence, therefore requiring a retransmit.

Tony.
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