TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions M. Bashyam
Working Group Ocarina Networks, Inc
Internet-Draft M. Jethanandani
Intended status: Informational A. Ramaiah
Expires: March 12, 2012 Cisco
September 9, 2011
Clarification of sender behavior in persist condition.
draft-ietf-tcpm-persist-06.txt
Abstract
This document clarifies the Zero Window Probes (ZWP) described in
Requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122]. In particular, it
clarifies the actions that can be taken on connections which are
experiencing the ZWP condition. This draft clarifies what has been
till now a misinterpretation of the standard as specified in RFC 1122
[RFC1122] rather than making a change to the standard.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on March 12, 2012.
Copyright Notice
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include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Discussion on RFC 1122 Requirement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Description of one Simple Attack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Clarification Regarding RFC 1122 Requirements . . . . . . . . 6
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
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1. Introduction
Section 4.2.2.17 of Requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122] says:
"A TCP MAY keep its offered receive window closed indefinitely.
As long as the receiving TCP continues to send acknowledgments in
response to the probe segments, the sending TCP MUST allow the
connection to stay open."
DISCUSSION:
It is extremely important to remember that ACK (acknowledgment)
segments that contain no data are not reliably transmitted by
TCP.
Therefore zero window probing needs to be supported to prevent a
connection from hanging forever if ACK segments that re-opens the
window is lost. The condition where the sender goes into the Zero
Window Probe (ZWP) mode is typically known as the 'persist
condition'.
This guidance is not intended to preclude resource management by the
operating system or application, which may request connections to be
aborted regardless of them being in the persist condition, and the
TCP implementation needs to, of course, comply by aborting such
connections. TCP implementations that misinterpret Section 4.2.2.17
of Requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122] have the potential to
make systems vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) [RFC4732]
scenarios where attackers tie up resources by keeping connections in
the persist condition, if such resource management is not performed
external to the protocol implementation.
This draft clarifies what has been till now a misinterpretation of
the standard as specified in RFC 1122 [RFC1122], rather than making a
change to the standard.
Section 2 of this document describes why implementations might not
close connections merely because they are in the persist condition,
yet need to still allow such connections to be closed on command.
Section 3 outlines a simple attack on systems that do not
sufficiently manage connections in this state. Section 4 concludes
with a requirements-language clarification to the RFC 1122
requirement.
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2. Discussion on RFC 1122 Requirement
Per Requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122] as long as the ACK's
are being received for window probes, a connection can continue to
stay in the persist condition. This is an important feature because
typically applications would want the TCP connection to stay open
unless an application explicitly closes the connection.
For example take the case of user running a network print job during
which the printer runs out of paper and is waiting for the user
intervention to reload the paper tray. The printer may not be
reading data from the printing application during this time.
Although this may result in a prolonged ZWP state, it would be
premature for TCP to take action on its own and close the printer
connecting merely due to its lack of progress. Once the printer's
paper tray is reloaded (which may be minutes, hours, or days later),
the print job needs to be able to continue uninterrupted over the
same TCP connection.
Systems that misinterpret the above section of Requirements for
Internet Hosts [RFC1122] may fall victim to DoS attacks, by not
supporting sufficient mechanisms to allow release of system resources
tied up by connections in the persist condition during times of
resource exhaustion. For example, if we take the case of a busy
server where multiple (attacker) clients can advertise a zero window
forever (by reliably acknowledging the ZWPs). This could eventually
lead to the resource exhaustion in the server system. In such cases
the application or operating system would need to take appropriate
action on the TCP connection to reclaim their resources and continue
to maintain legitimate connections.
The problem is applicable to TCP and TCP derived flow-controlled
transport protocols like SCTP.
Clearly, a system needs to be robust to such attacks and allow
connections in the persist condition to be aborted in the same way as
any other connection. Section 4 of this document provides the
requisite clarification, to permit such resource management
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3. Description of one Simple Attack
To illustrate a potential DoS scenario, consider the case where many
client applications open TCP connection with a HTTP [RFC2616] server,
and each sends a GET request for a large page and stops reading the
response partway through. This causes the client's TCP
implementation to advertise a zero window to the server. For every
large HTTP response, the server is left holding on to the response
data in its sending queue. The amount of response data held will
depend on the size of the send buffer and the advertised window. If
the clients never read the data in their receive queues in order to
clear the persist condition, the server will continue to hold that
data indefinitely. Since there may be a limit to the operating
system kernel memory available for TCP buffers, this may result in
DoS to legitimate connections by locking up the necessary resources.
If the above scenario persists for an extended period of time, it
will lead to TCP buffers and connection blocks starvation causing
legitimate existing connections and new connection attempts to fail.
A clever application needs to detect such attacks with connections
that are not making progress, and could close these connections.
However, some applications might have transferred all the data to the
TCP socket and subsequently closed the socket leaving the connection
with no controlling process, hereby referred to as orphaned
connections. Such orphaned connections might be left holding the
data indefinitely in their sending queue.
CERT has released an advisory in this regard[VU723308] and is making
vendors aware of this DoS scenario.
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4. Clarification Regarding RFC 1122 Requirements
As stated in Requirements for Internet Hosts [RFC1122], a TCP
implementation MUST NOT close a connection merely because it seems to
be stuck in the ZWP or persist condition. Unstated in RFC 1122, but
implicit for system robustness, a TCP implementation needs to allow
connections in the ZWP or persist condition to be closed or aborted
by their applications or other resource management routines in the
operating system.
An interface that allows an application to inform TCP on what to do
when the connection stays in persist condition, or for application or
other resource manager to query the health of the TCP connection is
considered outside the scope of this document. All such techniques
however are in complete compliance of TCP [RFC0793] and Requirements
for Internet Hosts [RFC1122].
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5. IANA Considerations
This document has no actions for IANA.
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6. Security Considerations
This document discusses one system security consideration as
described in Security Considerations Guidelines [RFC3552]. In
particular it describes a inappropriate use of a system that is
acting as a server for many users. That and a possible DoS attack is
discussed in Section 3.
The document limits itself to clarifying RFC 1122. It does not
discuss what can happen with orphaned connections and other possible
mitigation techniques, as these are considered outside the scope of
this document.
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7. Acknowledgments
This document was inspired by the recent discussions that took place
regarding the TCP persist condition issue in the TCPM WG mailing list
[TCPM]. The outcome of those discussions was to come up with a draft
that would clarify the intentions of the ZWP referred by RFC 1122.
We would like to thank Mark Allman, Ted Faber and David Borman for
clarifying the objective behind this draft. To Wesley Eddy for his
extensive editorial comments and to Dan Wing, Mark Allman and
Fernando Gont on providing feedback on the document.
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8. References
8.1. Normative References
[RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
RFC 793, September 1981.
[RFC1122] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
8.2. Informative References
[RFC2616] Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,
Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.
[RFC3552] Rescorla, E. and B. Korver, "Guidelines for Writing RFC
Text on Security Considerations", BCP 72, RFC 3552,
July 2003.
[RFC4732] Handley, M., Rescorla, E., and IAB, "Internet Denial-of-
Service Considerations", RFC 4732, December 2006.
[TCPM] TCPM, "IETF TCPM Working Group and mailing list
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/tcpm.charter.html".
[VU723308]
Manion, "Vulnerability in Web Servers
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/723308", July 2009.
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Authors' Addresses
Murali Bashyam
Ocarina Networks, Inc
42 Airport Parkway
San Jose, CA 95110
USA
Phone: +1 (408) 512-2966
Email: mbashyam@ocarinanetworks.com
Mahesh Jethanandani
Cisco
170 Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Phone: +1 (408) 527-8230
Email: mjethanandani@gmail.com
Anantha Ramaiah
Cisco
170 Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
USA
Phone: +1 (408) 525-6486
Email: ananth@cisco.com
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