INTERNET-DRAFT V. Gill
draft-ietf-rtgwg-rfc3682bis-02.txt J. Heasley
D. Meyer
Category Experimental
Expires: October 2004 April 2004
The Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM)
Status of this Memo
This document is an Internet-Draft and is subject to all provisions
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Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.
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Abstract
The use of a packet's Time to Live (TTL) (IPv4) or Hop Limit (IPv6)
to protect a protocol stack from CPU-utilization based attacks has
been proposed in many settings (see for example, RFC 2461). This
document generalizes these techniques for use by other protocols such
as BGP (RFC 1771), Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP),
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection, and Label Distribution Protocol
(LDP) (RFC 3036). While the Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM)
is most effective in protecting directly connected protocol peers, it
can also provide a lower level of protection to multi-hop sessions.
GTSM is not directly applicable to protocols employing flooding
mechanisms (e.g., multicast), and use of multi-hop GTSM should be
considered on a case-by-case basis.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Assumptions Underlying GTSM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. GTSM Negotiation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Assumptions on Attack Sophistication. . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. GTSM Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Multi-hop Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.1.1. Intra-domain Protocol Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1. TTL (Hop Limit) Spoofing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.2. Tunneled Packets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.2.1. IP in IP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5.2.2. IP in MPLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.3. Multi-Hop Protocol Sessions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.1. Normative References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7.2. Informative References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
9. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
10. Intellectual Property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
11. Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1. Introduction
The Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM) is designed to protect
a router's TCP/IP based control plane from CPU-utilization based
attacks. In particular, while cryptographic techniques can protect
the router-based infrastructure (e.g., BGP [RFC1771], [RFC1772]) from
a wide variety of attacks, many attacks based on CPU overload can be
prevented by the simple mechanism described in this document. Note
that the same technique protects against other scarce-resource
attacks involving a router's CPU, such as attacks against processor-
line card bandwidth.
GTSM is based on the fact that the vast majority of protocol peerings
are established between routers that are adjacent [PEERING]. Thus
most protocol peerings are either directly between connected
interfaces or at the worst case, are between loopback and loopback,
with static routes to loopbacks. Since TTL spoofing is considered
nearly impossible, a mechanism based on an expected TTL value can
provide a simple and reasonably robust defense from infrastructure
attacks based on forged protocol packets.
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Finally, the GTSM mechanism is equally applicable to both TTL (IPv4)
and Hop Limit (IPv6), and from the perspective of GTSM, TTL and Hop
Limit have identical semantics. As a result, in the remainder of this
document the term "TTL" is used to refer to both TTL or Hop Limit (as
appropriate).
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, RFC 2119
[RFC2119].
2. Assumptions Underlying GTSM
GTSM is predicated upon the following assumptions:
(i) The vast majority of protocol peerings are between adjacent
routers [PEERING].
(ii) It is common practice for many service providers to
ingress filter (deny) packets that have the provider's
loopback addresses as the source IP address.
(iii) Use of GTSM is OPTIONAL, and can be configured on a
per-peer (group) basis.
(iv) The router supports a method of classifying traffic
destined for the route processor into interesting/control
and not-control queues.
(v) The peer routers both implement GTSM.
2.1. GTSM Negotiation
This document assumes that GTSM will be manually configured between
protocol peers. That is, no automatic GTSM capability negotiation,
such as is envisioned by RFC 2842 [RFC2842] is assumed or defined.
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2.2. Assumptions on Attack Sophistication
Throughout this document, we assume that potential attackers have
evolved in both sophistication and access to the point that they can
send control traffic to a protocol session, and that this traffic
appears to be valid control traffic (i.e., has the source/destination
of configured peer routers).
We also assume that each router in the path between the attacker and
the victim protocol speaker decrements TTL properly (clearly, if
either the path or the adjacent peer is compromised, then there are
worse problems to worry about).
Since the vast majority of our peerings are between adjacent routers,
we can set the TTL on the protocol packets to 255 (the maximum
possible for IP) and then reject any protocol packets that come in
from configured peers which do NOT have an inbound TTL of 255.
GTSM can be disabled for applications such as route-servers and other
large diameter multi-hop peerings. In the event that an the attack
comes in from a compromised multi-hop peering, that peering can be
shut down (a method to reduce exposure to multi-hop attacks is
outlined below).
3. GTSM Procedure
GTSM SHOULD NOT be enabled by default. The following process
describes the per-peer behavior:
(i) If GTSM is enabled, an implementation performs the
following procedure:
(a) For directly connected routers,
o Set the outbound TTL for the protocol connection to
255.
o For each configured protocol peer:
Update the receive path Access Control List (ACL)
or firewall to only allow protocol packets to pass
onto the Route Processor (RP) that have the correct
<source, destination, TTL> tuple. The TTL must
either be 255 (for a directly connected peer), or
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255-(configured-range-of-acceptable-hops)
for a multi-hop peer. We specify a range here to
achieve some robustness to changes in topology. Any
directly connected check MUST be disabled for such
peerings.
It is assumed that a receive path ACL is an ACL
that is designed to control which packets are
allowed to go to the RP. This procedure will only
allow protocol packets from adjacent router to pass
onto the RP.
(b) If the inbound TTL is less than 255 for a directly
connected peer, or less than
255-(configured-range-of-acceptable-hops) for a
multi-hop peer, the packet is NOT processed. Rather,
the packet is placed into a low priority queue, and
subsequently logged and/or silently discarded. In
this case, an ICMP message MUST NOT be generated.
(ii) If GTSM is not enabled, normal protocol behavior is followed.
3.1. Multi-hop Scenarios
When a multi-hop protocol session is required, we set the expected
TTL value to be 255-(configured-range-of-acceptable-hops). This
approach provides a qualitatively lower degree of security for the
protocol implementing GTSM (i.e., a DoS attack could theoretically be
launched by compromising some box in the path). However, GTSM will
still catch the vast majority of observed DDoS attacks against a
given protocol. Note that since the number of hops can change rapidly
in real network situations, it is considered that GTSM may not be
able to handle this scenario adequately and an implementation MAY
provide OPTIONAL support.
3.1.1. Intra-domain Protocol Handling
In general, GTSM is not used for intra-domain protocol peers or
adjacencies. The special case of iBGP peers can be protected by
filtering at the network edge for any packet that has a source
address of one of the loopback addresses used for the intra-domain
peering. In addition, the current best practice is to further protect
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such peers or adjacencies with an MD5 signature [RFC2385].
4. Acknowledgments
The use of the TTL field to protect BGP originated with many
different people, including Paul Traina and Jon Stewart. Ryan
McDowell also suggested a similar idea. Steve Bellovin, Jay
Borkenhagen, Randy Bush, Alfred Hoenes, Vern Paxon, Pekka Savola, and
Robert Raszuk also provided useful feedback on earlier versions of
this document. David Ward provided insight on the generalization of
the original BGP-specific idea.
5. Security Considerations
GTSM is a simple procedure that protects single hop protocol
sessions, except in those cases in which the peer has been
compromised.
5.1. TTL (Hop Limit) Spoofing
The approach described here is based on the observation that a TTL
(or Hop Limit) value of 255 is non-trivial to spoof, since as the
packet passes through routers towards the destination, the TTL is
decremented by one. As a result, when a router receives a packet, it
may not be able to determine if the packet's IP address is valid, but
it can determine how many router hops away it is (again, assuming
none of the routers in the path are compromised in such a way that
they would reset the packet's TTL).
Note, however, that while engineering a packet's TTL such that it has
a particular value when sourced from an arbitrary location is
difficult (but not impossible), engineering a TTL value of 255 from
non-directly connected locations is not possible (again, assuming
none of the directly connected neighbors are compromised, the packet
hasn't been tunneled to the decapsulator, and the intervening routers
are operating in accordance with RFC 791 [RFC791]).
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5.2. Tunneled Packets
An exception to the observation that a packet with TTL of 255 is
difficult to spoof occurs when a protocol packet is tunneled to a
decapsulator who then forwards the packet to a directly connected
protocol peer. In this case the decapsulator (tunnel endpoint) can
either be the penultimate hop, or the last hop itself. A related case
arises when the protocol packet is tunneled directly to the protocol
peer (the protocol peer is the decapsulator).
When the protocol packet is encapsulated in IP, it is possible to
spoof the TTL. It may also be impossible to legitimately get the
packet to the protocol peer with a TTL of 255, as in the IP in MPLS
cases described below.
Finally, note that the security of any tunneling technique depends
heavily on authentication at the tunnel endpoints, as well as how the
tunneled packets are protected in flight. Such mechanisms are,
however, beyond the scope of this memo.
Protocol packets may be tunneled over IP directly to a protocol peer,
or to a decapsulator (tunnel endpoint) that then forwards the packet
to a directly connected protocol peer (e.g., in IP-in-IP [RFC2003],
GRE [RFC2784], or various forms of IPv6-in-IPv4 [RFC2893]). These
cases are depicted below.
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Peer router ---------- Tunnel endpoint router and peer
TTL=255 [tunnel] [TTL=255 at ingress]
[TTL=255 at egress]
Peer router ---------- Tunnel endpoint router ----- On-link peer
TTL=255 [tunnel] [TTL=255 at ingress] [TTL=254 at ingress]
[TTL=254 at egress]
In the first case, in which the encapsulated packet is tunneled
directly to the protocol peer, the encapsulated packet's TTL can be
set arbitrary value. In the second case, in which the encapsulated
packet is tunneled to a decapsulator (tunnel endpoint) which then
forwards it to a directly connected protocol peer, RFC 2003 specifies
the following behavior:
When encapsulating a datagram, the TTL in the inner IP
header is decremented by one if the tunneling is being
done as part of forwarding the datagram; otherwise, the
inner header TTL is not changed during encapsulation. If
the resulting TTL in the inner IP header is 0, the
datagram is discarded and an ICMP Time Exceeded message
SHOULD be returned to the sender. An encapsulator MUST
NOT encapsulate a datagram with TTL = 0.
Hence the inner IP packet header's TTL, as seen by the decapsulator,
can be set to an arbitrary value (in particular, 255). As a result,
it may not be possible to deliver the protocol packet to the peer
with a TTL of 255.
5.2.2. IP in MPLS
Protocol packets may also be tunneled over MPLS to a protocol peer
which either the penultimate hop (when the penultimate hop popping
(PHP) is employed [RFC3032]), or one hop beyond the penultimate hop.
These cases are depicted below.
Peer router ---------- Penultimate Hop (PH) and peer
TTL=255 [tunnel] [TTL=255 at ingress]
[TTL<=254 at egress]
Peer router ---------- Penultimate Hop -------- On-link peer
TTL=255 [tunnel] [TTL=255 at ingress] [TTL <=254 at ingress]
[TTL<=254 at egress]
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TTL handling for these cases is described in RFC 3032. RFC 3032
states that when the IP packet is first labeled:
... the TTL field of the label stack entry MUST BE set to the
value of the IP TTL field. (If the IP TTL field needs to be
decremented, as part of the IP processing, it is assumed that
this has already been done.)
When the label is popped:
When a label is popped, and the resulting label stack is empty,
then the value of the IP TTL field SHOULD BE replaced with the
outgoing TTL value, as defined above. In IPv4 this also
requires modification of the IP header checksum.
where the definition of "outgoing TTL" is:
The "incoming TTL" of a labeled packet is defined to be the
value of the TTL field of the top label stack entry when the
packet is received.
The "outgoing TTL" of a labeled packet is defined to be the larger of:
a) one less than the incoming TTL,
b) zero.
In either of these cases, the minimum value by which the TTL could be
decremented would be one (the network operator prefers to hide its
infrastructure by decrementing the TTL by the minimum number of LSP
hops, one, rather than decrementing the TTL as it traverses its MPLS
domain). As a result, the maximum TTL value at egress from the MPLS
cloud is 254 (255-1), and as a result the check described in section
3 will fail.
5.3. Multi-Hop Protocol Sessions
While the GTSM method is less effective for multi-hop protocol
sessions, it does close the window on several forms of attack.
However, in the multi-hop scenario GTSM is an OPTIONAL extension.
Protection of the protocol infrastructure beyond what is provided by
the GTSM method will likely require cryptographic machinery such as
is envisioned by Secure BGP (S-BGP) [SBGP1,SBGP2], and/or other
extensions. Finally, note that in the multi-hop case described
above, we specify a range of acceptable TTLs in order to achieve some
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robustness to topology changes. This robustness to topological
change comes at the cost of the loss of some robustness to different
forms of attack.
6. IANA Considerations
This document creates no new requirements on IANA namespaces
[RFC2434].
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[RFC791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol Specification",
STD 5, RFC 791, September 1981.
[RFC1771] Rekhter, Y. and T. Li (Editors), "A Border
Gateway Protocol (BGP-4)", RFC 1771, March 1995.
[RFC1772] Rekhter, Y. and P. Gross, "Application of the
Border Gateway Protocol in the Internet", RFC
1772, March 1995.
[RFC2003] Perkins, C., "IP Encapsulation with IP", RFC
2003, October 1996.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to
Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
March 1997.
[RFC2385] Heffernan, A., "Protection of BGP Sessions via
the TCP MD5 Signature Option", RFC 2385, August
1998.
[RFC2461] Narten, T., Nordmark, E. and W. Simpson,
"Neighbor Discover for IP Version 6 (IPv6)", RFC
2461, December 1998.
[RFC2784] Farinacci, D., "Generic Routing Encapsulation
(GRE)", RFC 2784, March 2000.
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[RFC2842] Chandra, R. and J. Scudder, "Capabilities
Advertisement with BGP-4", RFC 2842, May 2000.
[RFC2893] Gilligan, R. and E. Nordmark, "Transition
Mechanisms for IPv6 Hosts and Routers", RFC 2893,
August 2000.
[RFC3036] Andersson, L., Doolan, P., Feldman, N., Fredette,
A. and B. Thomas, "LDP Specification", RFC 3036,
January 2001.
[RFC3032] Rosen, E. Tappan, D., Fedorkow, G., Rekhter, Y.,
Farinacci, D., Li, T. and A. Conta, "MPLS Label
Stack Encoding", RFC 3032, January 2001.
[SBGP1] Kent, S., C. Lynn, and K. Seo, "Secure Border
Gateway Protocol (Secure-BGP)", IEEE Journal on
Selected Areas in Communications, volume 18,
number 4, April 2000.
[SBGP2] Kent, S., C. Lynn, J. Mikkelson, and K. Seo,
"Secure Border Gateway Protocol (S-BGP) -- Real
World Performance and Deployment Issues",
Proceedings of the IEEE Network and Distributed
System Security Symposium, February, 2000.
7.2. Informative References
[BFD] Katz, D. and D. Ward, "Bidirectional Forwarding
Detection", draft-katz-ward-bfd-02.txt, Work in
Progress.
[PEERING] Empirical data gathered from the Sprint and AOL
backbones, October, 2002.
[RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations
Involved in the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11,
RFC 2028, October 1996.
[RFC2434] Narten, T., and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for
Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs",
BCP 26, RFC 2434, October 1998.
[RFC3618] Meyer, D. and W. Fenner, Eds., "The Multicast
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Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP)", RFC 3618,
October 2003.
8. Authors' Addresses
Vijay Gill
EMail: vijay@umbc.edu
John Heasley
EMail: heas@shrubbery.net
David Meyer
EMail: dmm@1-4-5.net
9. Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). This document is subject
to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78 and
except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights.
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
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The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
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TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
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MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
10. Intellectual Property
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11. Acknowledgement
Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
Internet Society.
Gill, et al. Section 11. [Page 14]
