Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

Re: IPSEC over load-shared T1s (per packet)


From: Mikael Olsson <mikael.olsson () clavister com>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 20:17:47 +0200


Ben Nagy wrote:

The packets were being sent over alternating links in strict round-robin,
which meant that the ESP packets sometimes arrived out of sequence. The
IPSec implementation was dropping all the ones with seq < currentseq, which
was causing retransmits in the tunneled TCP sessions.

I'm thinking $vendor should fix their code. Keeping track of which of 
the past n segments have or have not arrived is not rocket science, 
and it allows out-of-order delivery without packet loss.

From RFC2401:

      o Anti-Replay Window: a 32-bit counter and a bit-map (or
        equivalent) used to determine whether an inbound AH or ESP
        packet is a replay.
        [REQUIRED for all implementations but used only for inbound
        traffic. NOTE: If anti-replay has been disabled by the
        receiver, e.g., in the case of a manually keyed SA, then the
        Anti-Replay Window is not used.]

The "bit-map" they're talking about is the same thing I was 
talking about. I say re-open the ticket. Reordering happens.
Implementations that do not take that into account are broken.

-- 
Mikael Olsson, Clavister AB
Storgatan 12, Box 393, SE-891 28 ÖRNSKÖLDSVIK, Sweden
Phone: +46 (0)660 29 92 00   Mobile: +46 (0)70 26 222 05
Fax: +46 (0)660 122 50       WWW: http://www.clavister.com
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