Hi I keep stumbling about that "recommendational wording" in RFC 2460 everytime I teach it.
Couldn't we update RFC2460 and make this list a strict order? I would want my firewall to notify me if the EHs in a packet do not follow the list. And limiting the number of possible EHs per packet might be a good idea. Silvia -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: ipv6-wg [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag von Benedikt Stockebrand Gesendet: Sonntag, 17. Mai 2015 18:39 An: [email protected] Betreff: Re: [ipv6-wg] Extension Headers / Impact on Security Devices Hi Enno and list, Enno Rey <[email protected]> writes: > hope everybody had a great #RIPE70 meeting. We did! > Many thanks to the organizers and chairs! and thanks to the actual speakers as well the speakers we had to turn down due to time constraints, too:-) > If the chairs consider this appropriate we will happily give a > presentation on this stuff in Bucharest or at another occasion. Sounds good to me! > - looking at the "liberty" RFC2460 provides as for ext_hdrs (wrt to > their number, order[...] Actually, as far as I'm concerned that's the real core of the problem. Or more specifically, the first two lines of RFC 2460, section 4.1: When more than one extension header is used in the same packet, it is recommended that those headers appear in the following order: followed on the next page by Each extension header should occur at most once, except for the Destination Options header which should occur at most twice (once before a Routing header and once before the upper-layer header). Note in particular that these are not even RFC 2119 "SHOULD" or "RECOMMENDED" and such. The impact here is actually at least twofold: - It is impossible to implement this as a simple pipeline architecture in hardware; at least for cases deviating from the "recommendations" above this effectively becomes either excessively complex to implement in hardware or an invitation to DoS when implemented in software on an otherwise hardware router. - As I understand it, at least some of the issues you have found are effectively based on violating the second paragraph quoted, making it impossible to come up with a lower bound on how long the header chain can actually get and therefore leading to the fragmentation related attacks and similar you have discovered. The original idea was that the extension headers are processed strictly in the order they occur, so one question to ask is if there is any valid reason to violate these "recommendations" for other than malicious purposes. Cheers, Benedikt -- Benedikt Stockebrand, Stepladder IT Training+Consulting Dipl.-Inform. http://www.stepladder-it.com/ Business Grade IPv6 --- Consulting, Training, Projects BIVBlog---Benedikt's IT Video Blog: http://www.stepladder-it.com/bivblog/
