PaulDotCom mailing list archives
Drop or rst?
From: mick at pauldotcom.com (Michael Douglas)
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 23:46:18 -0400
<sarcasm> Also if you drop packets instead of sending the RST, you're saving power. Since I get all the trade rags, I know green data centers are all the rage. Every electron not sent down the wire is one less polar bear that has to tread water. Dropping packets saves Mother Earth! </sarcasm> Dropping is so much better because while you don't want to do the "security by obscurity" thing, you certainly don't want to make things easier for the bad guys. As others have said giving RSTs makes it crystal clear what systems are around, and what ports are open. If you do have to go the RST route for troubleshooting, see if you can enable RST response for only specific IPs or ranges. If that doesn't or can't fly (and on internet facing systems you might not want to enable RST even for a little while - though western civilization likely wouldn't end if you had to for a while), you can always tune nmap to assume a port is closed faster Try using the --host-timeout option! (one of the least used sadly) It takes arguments like so: 300000 or 300s or 5m. In your case, you'll want to use miliseconds (Hint: no letter after the time value) To get the "right" value, you'll need to do testing on how quickly an open port responds and then give it some extra time -- i give anywhere from 25% - 50% more time... ex: I know open port respond on a system respond on average around 130 milliseconds I might give nmap the following: --host-timeout 195 WARNING: setting your --host-timeout too low could result in nmap claiming a port is closed when it isn't. So you want to be on a low jitter, repeatable latency network link when doing this sort of stuff. For further ways to tune your nmap experience, you're likely not going to find a better writeup than here: http://nmap.org/book/man-performance.html Sorry to thread jack this a bit into arcane nmap stuffs, but hey, nmap is fun! Best of luck! - Mick On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Norman Rach <lostpacket at live.com> wrote:
Thanks everyone for your input.? I'll add this to the agenda at our next meeting as discussion points. Cheers! NR ________________________________ From: lostpacket at live.com To: pauldotcom at mail.pauldotcom.com Subject: Drop or rst? Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 09:39:07 -0700 Hi Everyone, I'm currently in a discussion about our current ruleset for iptables. Whether to be?RFC compliant and issue a RST to those scanning/connecting to undesired ports or to drop the packet completely.? By sending a rst back to the host aren't we letting the srcIP know that the traffic successfully?arrived to the host without being intercepted by a network appliance (i.e. IDS/IPS, firewall, etc)? As far as I can tell this seems to be more of a discussion on one's own security posture preference.? Any feedback is appreciated. Cheers! NR ________________________________ Hotmail: Powerful Free email with security by Microsoft. Get it now. ________________________________ Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft?s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now. _______________________________________________ Pauldotcom mailing list Pauldotcom at mail.pauldotcom.com http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
Current thread:
- Drop or rst? Norman Rach (Oct 07)
- Drop or rst? Ron Gula (Oct 07)
- Drop or rst? Brett Hoff (Oct 07)
- Drop or rst? Ben Greenfield (Oct 07)
- Drop or rst? Butturini, Russell (Oct 07)
- Drop or rst? Nils (Oct 08)
- Drop or rst? Jack Daniel (Oct 08)
- Drop or rst? Ben Greenfield (Oct 07)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Drop or rst? Norman Rach (Oct 08)
- Drop or rst? Michael Douglas (Oct 08)
- Drop or rst? Jody & Jennifer McCluggage (Oct 10)
- Drop or rst? Nick Drage (Oct 15)
- Drop or rst? Michael Douglas (Oct 08)
- Drop or rst? Jody & Jennifer McCluggage (Oct 10)
- Drop or rst? Don Thomas (Oct 10)
- TheMiddler Nils (Oct 11)
- TheMiddler Rob Fuller (Oct 11)
- TheMiddler Nils (Oct 12)
- TheMiddler Nils (Oct 19)