nanog mailing list archives

Re: TCP/BGP vulnerability - easier than you think


From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch () muada com>
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:47:22 +0200


On 21-apr-04, at 21:17, Paul Jakma wrote:

I'm not recommending this for "small" peers as the crypto DoS risk
is worse than what happens when the attack is executed
successfully.

Why would MD5 be more of a crypto DoS risk with IPSec AH headers than
with bgp tcp-md5?

Beats me. But why do you bring up IPsec?

Anyway, what needs to happen is a form of crypto where the expensive algorithms are only executed for good packets and not for all packets.

For instance, in addition to the regular MD5 checksum we also include a checksum of part of the sequence number and the/a password. Since we know what sequence numbers to expect, we can calculate these additional checksum beforehand so the only thing that needs to happen for each (possibly spoofed) packet is checking whether it contains the right sequence number derived checksum. If it does, we know that the packet came from the actual peer so we proceed to check the MD5 checksum to make sure the data wasn't modified in transit.


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