TCP Maintenance and Minor T. Moncaster
Extensions BT
Internet-Draft B. Briscoe
Intended status: Informational BT & UCL
Expires: May 11, 2008 A. Jacquet
BT
November 8, 2007
A TCP Test to Allow Senders to Identify Receiver Non-Compliance
draft-moncaster-tcpm-rcv-cheat-02
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This Internet-Draft will expire on May 11, 2008.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).
Abstract
The TCP protocol relies on receivers sending accurate and timely
feedback to the sender. Currently the sender has no means to verify
that a receiver is correctly sending this feedback according to the
protocol. A receiver that is non-compliant has the potential to
disrupt a sender's resource allocation, increasing its transmission
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rate on that connection which in turn could adversely affect the
network itself. This document presents a two stage test process that
can be used to identify whether a receiver is non-compliant. The
tests enshrine the principle that one shouldn't attribute to malice
that which may be accidental. The first stage test causes minimum
impact to the receiver but raises a suspicion of non-compliance. The
second stage test can then be used to verify that the receiver is
non-compliant. This specification does not modify the core TCP
protocol - the tests can either be implemented as a test suite or as
a stand-alone test through a simple modification to the sender
implementation.
Status
By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware
have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that
other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of
six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as
reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt. The list of Internet-
Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.
Changes from previous drafts (to be removed by the RFC Editor)
From -01 to -02:
A number of changes made following an extensive review from Alfred
Hoenes. These were largely to better comply with the stated aims
of the previous version but also included some tidying up of the
protocol details and a new section on a possible unwanted
interaction.
From -00 to -01:
Draft rewritten to emphasise testing for non-compliance. Some
changes to protocol to remove possible unwanted interactions with
other TCP variants. Sections added on comparison of solutions and
alternative uses of test.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. The Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Concealing Lost Segments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. Optimistic Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Requirements for a robust solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Existing Proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.1. Randomly Skipped Segments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.2. The ECN nonce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.3. A transport layer nonce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6. The Test for Receiver Non-compliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6.1. Solution Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6.2. Probabilistic Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
6.2.1. Performing the Probabilistic Test . . . . . . . . . . 15
6.2.2. Assessing the Probabilistic Test . . . . . . . . . . . 17
6.2.3. RTT Measurement Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
6.2.4. Negative Impacts of the Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.2.5. Protocol Details for the Probabilistic Test . . . . . 20
6.3. Deterministic Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
6.3.1. Performing the Deterministic Test . . . . . . . . . . 22
6.3.2. Assessing the Deterministic Test . . . . . . . . . . . 22
6.3.3. Protocol Details for the Deterministic Test . . . . . 22
6.4. Responding to Non-Compliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
6.5. Possible Interactions With Other TCP Features . . . . . . 23
6.5.1. TCP Secure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
6.5.2. Nagle Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
6.5.3. Delayed Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
6.5.4. Best Effort Transport Service . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
6.6. Possible Consequences of the Tests . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7. Comparison of the Different Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8. Alternative Uses of the Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
11. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
12. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
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13. Comments Solicited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
14. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
14.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
14.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 31
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1. Introduction
This document specifies how a TCP sender implementation can be
modified to detect a non-compliant receiver. It uses the standard
wire protocol and protocol semantics of basic TCP [RFC0793] without
modification.
When any network resource (e.g. a link) becomes congested, the
congestion control protocol [RFC2581] within TCP/IP relies on the
voluntary compliance of all senders and all receivers that are using
paths through the resource. The protocol expects all receivers to
correctly feed back congestion information and it expects each sender
to respond by backing off its rate in response to this information.
Over the past several years the Internet has become increasingly
adversarial. Self-interested or malicious parties may produce non-
compliant protocol implementations if it is to their advantage, or to
the disadvantage of their chosen victims. To enforce congestion
control when trust can not be taken for granted is extremely hard
within the current Internet architecture. This specification deals
with one specific case: where a TCP sender is TCP compliant and wants
to ensure its receivers are compliant as well.
Simple attacks have been published showing that TCP receivers can
manipulate feedback to fool TCP senders into massively exceeding the
compliant rate [Savage]. Such receivers might want to make senders
unwittingly launch a denial of service attack on other flows sharing
part of the path between them [Sherwood]. But a more likely
motivation is simple self-interest---a receiver can improve its own
download speed, without any need for the sender to be a willing
accomplice. [Savage] quotes results that show this attack can reduce
the time taken to download an HTTP file over a real network by half,
even with a relatively cautious optimistic acknowledgemnt strategy.
There is currently no evidence that any TCP implementations are
exploiting any of the attacks mentioned above. However this may be
simply a result of the fact that there is no widely available test to
identify such attacks. This document describes a test process that
can identify such non-compliance by receivers should it start to
become an issue. The test can be deployed as a separate test suite,
or in existing senders, but this document does not mandate that it
should be implemented by senders. The aim of the authors is to
provide a test that is safe to implement and that can be recommended
by the IETF.
The measures in this specification are intended for senders that can
be trusted to behave. As all senders can not be trusted, this scheme
can not prevent misbehaving senders from causing congestion collapse
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of the Internet. However the very existence of a test scheme such as
this should act as a disincentive against non-compliant receivers.
Senders do not have to be motivated solely by "the common good" to
deploy these changes. It is directly in their own interest for
senders serving multiple receivers (e.g. large file servers and
certain file-sharing peers) to detect non-compliant receivers. A
large server relies in part on network congestion feedback to
efficiently apportion its own resources between receivers. If such a
large server devotes an excessive fraction of its own resources to
non-compliant receivers, it may well hit its own resource limits and
have to starve other half-connections even if their network path has
spare capacity.
In order for a sender to test a receiver, we avoid requiring the
receiver to have deployed any new or optional protocol features, as
any misbehaving receiver could simply circumvent the test by claiming
it did not support the optional feature. Instead, the sender
emulates network re-ordering and then network loss to test that the
receiver reacts as it should according to the basic TCP protocol. It
is important that the level of emulated re-ordering that such a test
introduces should not adversely impact compliant receivers.
This document specifies a two-stage test in which the sender
deliberately re-orders some data segments so as to check if the
destination correctly acknowledges out-of-order segments. The first
stage test introduces a small reordering which will have a related
very minor performance hit. It is not a conclusive test of
compliance. However, failing it strongly suggests the receiver is
non-compliant. This raises sufficient suspicion to warrant the more
intrusive but conclusive second stage if this non-compliance is going
to be sanctioned. The second stage proves beyond doubt whether the
receiver is non-compliant but it also requires significant re-
ordering, which harms performance. Therefore it should not be used
unless a receiver is already strongly suspected of non-compliance
(through failing the first stage).
The technique is designed to work with all known variants of TCP,
with or without ECN [RFC3168], with or without SACK [RFC2018], and so
on. The technique is probably transferable to derivatives of TCP,
such as SCTP [RFC2960], but separate specifications will be required
for such related transports. The requirements for a robust solution
in Section 4 serve as guidelines for these separate specifications.
The document is structured as follows. It begins with a detailed
description of the problems outlined above. It cites some published
results that show how damaging these problems potentially are. It
sets out some simple requirements that have to be met by any robust
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solution. It examines three existing proposed solutions in more
detail, compares them against the list of requirements and
demonstrates why they are not suitably robust. It then details the
proposed two-stage re-ordering test, directly utilising one of the
solutions already proposed as its second stage and modifying it
slightly for the first stage.
2. Requirements notation
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 [RFC2119].
3. The Problems
TCP is widely used as the end-to-end transport in the Internet. In
order to avoid the congestion collapses that plagued the Internet in
the mid 1980's, TCP utilises a number of mechanisms to avoid
congestion [RFC2581]. These mechanisms all rely on knowing that data
has been received (through acknowledgments of that data) and knowing
when congestion has happened (either through knowing that a segment
was lost in flight or through being notified of an Explicit
Congestion Notification (ECN) [RFC3168]). TCP also uses a flow
control mechanism to control the rate at which data is sent
[RFC0813]. Both the flow control and congestion avoidance mechanisms
utilise a transmission window that limits the number of
unacknowledged segments that are allowed to be sent at any given
time. In order to work out the size of the transmission window, TCP
monitors the average round trip time (RTT) for each flow and the
number of unacknowledged segments still in flight.
A strategising receiver can take advantage of the congestion and flow
control mechanisms to increase its data throughput. The three known
ways in which it can do this are: optimistic acknowledgements,
concealing segment losses and dividing acknowledgements into smaller
parts. The first two are examined in more detail below and details
of the third can be found in [Savage].
3.1. Concealing Lost Segments
TCP is designed to view a lost segment as an indication of congestion
on the channel. This is because TCP makes the reasonable assumption
that packets are most likely to be lost through deliberately being
dropped by a congested node rather than through transmission losses
or errors.
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In order to avoid congestion collapse [RFC3714], whichever TCP
connection detects the congestion (through detecting that a packet
has been dropped) is expected to respond to it either by reducing its
congestion window to 1 segment after a timeout or by halving it on
receipt of three duplicate acks (the precise rules are set out in
[RFC2581]).
For applications where missing data is not an issue, it is in the
interest of a receiver to maximise the data rate it gets from the
sender. If it conceals lost segments by falsely generating
acknowledgements for them it will not suffer a reduction in data
rate. There are a number of ways to make an application loss-
insensitive. Some applications such as streaming media are
inherently insensitive anyway, as a loss will just be seen as a
transient error. TCP is widely used to transmit media files, either
audio or video, which are relatively insensitive to data loss
(depending on the encoding used). Also senders may be serving data
containing redundant parity to allow the application to recreate lost
data. A misbehaving receiver can also exploit application layer
protocols such as the partial GET in HTTP 1.1 [RFC2616] to recover
missing data over a secondary connection.
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|---.__ Drop | |---.__ Drop |
|---.__`---#200 | |---.__`---#200 |
| `---.__ | | `---.__ |
| `---.__ | | `---.__ |
| _,`300->| | _,`300->|
| __,---' | | __,---' |
| _,---' | | _,---' |
|<-100 | |<-300 |
|---.__ | |---.__ |
|---.__`---.__ | |---.__`---.__ |
| `---.__`---.__ | |---.__`---.__`---.__ |
| `---.__`400->| ,-|---.__`---.__`---.__`400->|
| _,`500->| | | `---.__`---._,`500->|
| __,---' | |R| __~---.__`600->|
| _,---' | - |T| _,---' _,`700->|
|<-100 | | |T|<-500 __,---' |
|---.__ | | | | _,---' |
,-|---.__`---.__ | | `-|<-700 |
| | `---.__`---.__ | |<-.
| | `---._,`600->| | \
|N| __,---'_,`700->| - +----------------------+
|E| _,---'__,---' | | receives segment 700 |
|W|<-100_,---' | | much sooner |
| |<-100_ | +----------------------+
|R|---.__`---.__ |
|T| `---.__`---.__ |
|T| `---._,`200->|
| | __,---' `300->| <-- No ack as duplicate data
| | _,---' |
`-|<-700 |
Figure 1: Concealing lost segments
3.2. Optimistic Acknowledgements
Optimistic acknowledgements were identified as a possible attack in
[Savage]. If a receiver is downloading a file from a server, it is
probably in its interest to acquire as high a bandwidth as possible
for this. One way of increasing the bandwidth is to encourage the
sender to believe the round trip time is shorter than it actually is.
This means the sender will open up its transmission window faster and
thus will send data faster. Of course any lost segments will also be
concealed during this attack.
The receiver can achieve this by sending acknowledgements for data it
hasn't actually received yet. As long as the acknowledgement is for
a packet that has already been transmitted, the sender will assume
the RTT has become shorter. This will cause it to increase its
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transmission window more rapidly and thus send more data. Optimistic
acknowledgements are particularly damaging since they can also be
used to significantly amplify the effect of a denial of service (DoS)
attack on a network. This form of attack is explained in more detail
in [Sherwood].
|---.__ | |---.__ |
| `---.__ | | `---.__ |
| `---.__ | | `---.__ |
| _,`100->| | _,`100->|
| __,---' | | __,---' |
| _,---' | | _,---' |
|<-100 | |<-100 |
|---.__ | |---.__ |
,-|---.__`---.__ | ,-|---.__`---.__ |
| | `---.__`---.__ | |R| `---.__`---.__ |
|R| `---.__`200->| |T| `---._,`200->|
|T| _,`300->| |T| __,---' `300->|
|T| __,---' | | | _,---' |
| | _,---' | `-|<-300 |
`-|<-300 | |---.__ |
|---.__ | |---.__`---.__ |
|---.__`---.__ | |---.__`---.__`---.__ |
|---.__`---.__`---.__ | |---.__`---.__`---._,`400->|
|---.__`---.__`---.__`400->| | `---.__`---._,`500->|
| `---.__`---._,`500->| | _,---'__~---.__`600->|
| __~---.__`600->| |<-500_,---' `700->|
| _,---' _,`700->| |<-700 |
|<-500 __,---' |
| _,---' |
|<-700 |
The flow on the left acknowledges data only once it is received. The
flow on the right acknowledges data before it is received and
consequently the apparent RTT is reduced.
Figure 2: Optimistic acknowledgements
In 2005 US-CERT (the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team)
issued a vulnerability notice [VU102014] specifically addressed to 80
major network equipment manufacturers and vendors who could be
affected if someone maliciously exploited optimistic acknowledgements
to cause a denial of service. This highlights the potential severity
of such an attack were one to be launched. It should be noted
however that the primary motivation for using optimistic
acknowledgement is likely to be the performance gain it gives rather
than the possible negative impact on the network. Application
writers may well produce "Download Accelerators" that use optimistic
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acknowledgements to achieve the performance increase rather than the
current parallel connection approach most use. Users of such
software would be effectively innocent parties to the potential harm
that such a non-compliant TCP could cause.
4. Requirements for a robust solution
Since the above problems come about through the inherent behaviour of
the TCP protocol, there is no gain in introducing a new protocol as
misbehaving receivers can claim to only support the old protocol.
The best approach is to provide a mechanism within the existing
protocol to test whether a receiver is compliant. The following
requirements should be met by any such test in TCP and are likely to
be applicable for similar tests in other transport protocols:
1. The compliance test must not adversely affect the existing
congestion control and avoidance algorithms since one of the
primary aims of any compliance test is to reinforce the integrity
of congestion control.
2. Any test should utilise existing features of the TCP protocol.
If it can be implemented without altering the existing protocol
then implementation and deployment are easier.
3. The receiver should not play an active role in the process. It
is much more secure to have a check for compliance that only
requires the receiver to behave as it should anyway.
4. It should not require the use of any negotiable TCP options.
Since the use of such options is by definition optional, any
misbehaving receiver could just choose not to use the appropriate
option.
5. If this is a periodic test, the receiver must not be aware that
it is being tested for compliance. If a misbehaving receiver can
tell that it is being tested (by identifying the pattern of
testing) it can choose to respond compliantly only whilst it is
being tested. If the test is always performed this clearly
doesn't apply.
6. If the sender actively sanctions any non-compliance it
identifies, it should be certain of the receiver's non-compliance
before taking action against it. Any false positives might lead
to inefficient use of network resources and could damage end-user
confidence in the network.
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7. The testing should not significantly reduce the performance of an
innocent receiver.
5. Existing Proposals
5.1. Randomly Skipped Segments
[Sherwood] suggests a simple approach to test a receiver's
compliance. The test involves randomly dropping segments at the
sender before they are transmitted. All TCP "flavours" require that
a receiver should generate duplicate acknowledgements for all
subsequent segments until a missing segment is received. This system
requires that SACK be enabled so the sender can reliably tell that
the duplicate acknowledgements are generated by the segment that is
meant to be missing and are not concealing other congestion. Once
the first duplicate acknowledgement arrives, the missing segment can
then be "re-transmitted". Because this loss has been deliberately
introduced, the sender doesn't treat it as a sign of congestion. If
a receiver sends an acknowledgement for a segment that was sent after
the gap, it proves it is misbehaving or that its TCP is completely
non-compliant. It can then be sanctioned. As soon as the first
duplicate acknowledgement is received the missing segment is "re-
transmitted". This will introduce a 1 RTT delay for some segments
which could adversely affect some low-latency applications.
This scheme does work perfectly well in principle and does allow the
sender to clearly identify dishonest behaviour. However it fails to
meet requirement 4 in Section 4 above since it requires SACK to be
used. If SACK were not used then it would fail to meet requirement 1
as it would be impossible to differentiate between the loss
introduced on purpose and any additional loss introduced by the
network.
It might be possible to incentivise the use of SACK by receivers by
stating that senders are entitled to discriminate against receivers
that don't support it. Given that SACK is now widely implemented
across the Internet this might be a feasible, but controversial,
deployment strategy. However the solution in Section 6 builds on
Sherwood's scheme but avoids the need for SACK.
5.2. The ECN nonce
The authors of the ECN scheme [RFC3168] identified the failure to
echo ECN marks as a potential attack on ECN. The ECN nonce was
proposed as a possible solution to this in the experimental
[RFC3540]. It uses a 1 bit nonce in every IP header. The nonce
works by randomly setting the ECN field to ECN(0) or ECN(1). The
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sender then maintains the least significant bit of the sum of this
value and stores the expected sum for each segment boundary. At the
receiver end, the same 1-bit sum is calculated and is echoed back in
the NS (nonce sum) flag added to the TCP header. If a packet has
been congestion marked then it loses the information of which ECT
codepoint it was carrying. A receiver wishing to conceal the ECN
mark will have to guess whether to increment NS or not. Once
congestion has been echoed back and the source has started a
congestion response the nonce sum in the TCP header is not checked.
Once congestion recovery is over the source resets its NS to that of
the destination and starts checking again.
On the face of it this solution also fully covers the two problems
identified in Section 3. If a receiver conceals a lost segment it
has to guess what mark was there and, over several guesses, is very
likely to be found out. If a receiver tries to use optimistic
acknowledgements it has to guess what nonce was set on all the
packets it acknowledges but hasn't received yet. However there are
some key weaknesses to this system. Firstly, it assumes that ECN
will be widely deployed (not currently true). Secondly, it relies on
the receiver honestly declaring support for both ECN and the ECN
nonce - a strategising receiver can simply declare it is neither ECN
nor ECN nonce capable and thus avoid the nonce. Thirdly, the
mechanism is suspended during any congestion response. Comparing it
against the requirements in Section 4 above, it is clear that the ECN
nonce fails to meet requirements 3 and 4 and arguably fails to meet
requirement 2 as [RFC3540] is experimental. The authors do state
that any sender that implements the ECN nonce is entitled to
discriminate against any receiver that doesn't support it. Given
there are currently no implementations of the ECN nonce,
discriminating against the overwhelming majority of receivers that
don't support it is not a feasible deployment strategy.
5.3. A transport layer nonce
One possible solution to the above issues is a multi-bit transport
layer nonce. Two versions of this are proposed in [Savage]. The
first is the so called "Singular Nonce" where each segment is
assigned a unique random number. This value is then echoed back to
the receiver with the ack for that segment. The second version is
the "Cumulative Nonce" where the nonce is set as before, but the
cumulative sum of all nonces is echoed back. Whilst such a system is
robust and allows a sender to correctly identify a misbehaving
receiver, it has the key drawback that it requires either the
creation of a new TCP option to carry the nonce and nonce reply or it
requires the TCP header to be extended to include both these fields.
This proposal clearly breaches several of the requirements listed in
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Section 4. It breaches requirement 2 in that it needs a completely
new TCP option or a change to the TCP header. It breaches
requirement 3 because it needs the receiver to actively echo the
nonce (as does the ECN nonce scheme) and if it uses a TCP option it
breaches requirement 4. On the face of it there is no obvious route
by which this sort of system can be widely implemented.
6. The Test for Receiver Non-compliance
6.1. Solution Overview
The ideal solution to the above problems should fully meet the
requirements set out in Section 4. The most important of these is
that the solution should leverage existing TCP behaviours rather than
mandating new behaviours and options. The proposed solution utilises
TCP's receiver behaviour on detecting missing data. To test a
receiver the sender delays a segment during transmission by D
segments. There is a trade off because increasing D increases the
probability of detecting non-compliance but also increases the
probability of masking a congestion event during the test. The
completely safe strategy for the sender would be to reduce its rate
pessimistically as if there were congestion during the test however
this will impact the performance of its receivers, thus breaching
requirement 7. To overcome this dilemma, the test consists of two
stages. In the first stage, the sender uses small displacements
without the pessimistic congestion response to determine which
receivers appear to be non-compliant. The sender can then prove the
non-compliance of these receivers by subjecting them to a
deterministic test. This test uses a longer displacement but given
the receiver is already under suspicion, it can risk harming
performance by pessimistically reducing its rate as if the segment it
held back was really lost by the network. The tests can either be
implemented as part of a test suite or as a stand-alone modification
to the TCP sender implementation. References to the TCP sender in
the rest of the document should be taken to include either type of
implementation.
6.2. Probabilistic Testing
The first requirement for a sender is to decide when to test a
receiver. This document doesn't specify when the test should be
performed but the following guidance may be helpful. The simplest
option is for a sender to perform the test at frequent random
intervals for all its half-connections. There are also some
heuristic triggers that might indicate the need for a test. Firstly,
if a sender is itself too busy, it would be sensible for it to test
all its receivers. Secondly, if the sender has many half-connections
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that are within a RTT of a congestion response, it would be sensible
to test all the half-connections that aren't in a congestion
response. Thirdly, the sender could aim to test all its half-
connections at least once. Finally it is to be expected that there
is a certain degree of existing segment reordering and thus a sender
should be suspicious of any receiver that isn't generating as many
duplicate acknowledgements as other receivers. [Piratla] explores
how prevalent reordering might be in the Internet though it is
unclear whether the figures given are more widely applicable.
The proposed solution depends, like the skipped segments solution, on
the strict requirement that all TCP receivers have to send a
duplicate acknowledgement as soon as they receive an out-of-order
segment. This acknowledges that some data has been received, however
the acknowledgement is for the last in order segment that was
received (hence duplicating an acknowledgment already made). SACK
extends this behaviour to allow the sender to infer exactly which
segments are missing. This leads to a simple statement: if a
receiver is behaving compliantly it must respond to an out-of-order
packet by generating a duplicate acknowledgement.
Following from the above statement, a sender can test the compliance
of a given receiver by simply delaying transmission of a given
segment by several places. A compliant receiver will respond to this
by generating a number of duplicate acknowledgements. The sender
would strongly suspect a receiver of non-compliance if it received no
duplicate acknowledgements as a result of the test. A misbehaving
receiver can only conceal its actions by waiting until the delayed
segment arrives and then generating an appropriate stream of
duplicate acknowledgements to appear to be honest.
6.2.1. Performing the Probabilistic Test
The actual mechanism for conducting the test is extremely simple.
Having decided to conduct a test the sender selects a segment, N. It
then chooses a displacement, D (in segments) for this segment where
strictly 2 < D < K - 2 where K is the current window size. In
practice only low values of D should be chosen to conceal the test
among the background reordering and limit the chance of masking
congestion. D SHOULD be 6 or less for an initial test. D MUST be
greater than 2 to allow for the standard fast retransmit trhreshold
of 3 duplicate acknowledgements. If K is less than 5, the sender
should arguably not perform any compliance testing. This is because
when the window is so small then non-compliance is not such a
significnat issue. The exception to this might be when this test is
being used for testing new implementations. To conduct the
probabilistic test, instead of transmitting segment N, it transmits
N+1, N+2, etc. as shown in the figure below. Once it has transmitted
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N+D it can transmit segment N. The sender needs to record the
sequence number, N as well as the displacement, D.
According to data in [Piratla], as much as 15% of segments in the
Internet arrive out of order though this claim may not be accurate.
Whatever the actual degree of re-ordering, receivers always expect
occasional losses of packets which they cannot distinguish from re-
ordering without waiting for the re-ordered packet to arrive.
Consequently a misbehaving receiver is unsure how to react to any
out-of-order packets it receives. It should be noted that the
natural reordering may reduce the displacement deliberately
introduced by the test so the sender should conduct the test more
than once.
|--.._ |
|--.._`--.._ |
|--.._`--.._`--.._ | +----------------------------+
|--.._`--.._`--.._`--.._ | | This figure shows how a |
|--.._`--.._`--.._`--.._`N-1->| | compliant receiver reacts |
|--.._`--.._`--.._`--.._`N+1->| | to a probabilistic test |
|--.._`--.._`--.._`-=.._`N+2->| | with D=4. It sends 4 dup. |
| `--.._`-=.._`-=.._`N+3->| | acknowledgements back to |
| _,--'_-=.._`-=.._`N+4->| | the sender before sending |
|<-N-1'_,--'__,--':-=.._`-N-->| | an acknowledgement for N+4 |
|<-N-1'_,--'__,--'__,--'`N+5->| +----------------------------+
|<-N-1'_,--'__,--'__,--'__,--'|
|<-N-1'_,--'__,--'__,--' |
|<-N-1'_,--'__,--' |
|<-N+4'_,--' |
|<-N+5'
Figure 3: A receiver reacting honestly to a probabilistic test
During testing, loss of segment L in the range from N+1 to N+D
inclusive will be temporarily masked by the duplicate
acknowledgements from the intentional gap that was introduced. In
this case the sender's congestion response will be delayed by at most
the offset D. If there is an actual loss during the test then, once
the receiver receives segment N, it will generate an acknowledgement
for L-1. This will lie between N and N+D. Thus it is reasonable to
treat receipt of any acknowledgement between N and N+D inclusive as
an indication of congestion and react accordingly. This will also
discourage the receiver from sending optimistic acknowledgements in
case these prove to lie in the middle of a testing sequence, in which
case it will trigger a congestion response by the sender. It also
means a dishonest receiver has to wait for a full K segments after
any genuine lost segment to be sure it isn't a test as it will
otherwise trigger a congestion response. Delaying by that long will
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quickly increase the RTT estimate and will soon reduce the
transmission rate by as much as if the receiver had reacted honestly
to the congestion.
As an additional safety measure, if the sender is performing slow
start when it decides to test the receiver, it should change to
congestion avoidance. The reason for this is in case there is any
congestion that is concealed during the test. If there is
congestion, and the sender's window is still increasing
exponentially, this might significantly exacerbate the situation.
This does mean that any receiver being tested during this period will
suffer reduced throughput, but such testing should only be triggered
by the sender being overloaded.
6.2.2. Assessing the Probabilistic Test
This approach to testing receiver compliance appears to meet all the
requirements set out in Section 4. The most attractive feature is
that it enforces equivalence with compliant behaviour. That is to
say, a receiver can either honestly report the missing packets or it
can suffer a reduced throughput by delaying segments and increasing
the RTT. The only significant drawback is that during a test it
introduces some delay to the reporting of actual congestion. Given
that TCP only reacts once to congestion in each RTT the delay doesn't
significantly adversely affect the overall response to severe
congestion.
Some receivers may choose to misbehave despite this. These can be
quickly identified by looking at their acknowledgements. A receiver
that never sends duplicate acknowledgements in response to being
tested is likely to be misbehaving. Equally, a receiver that delays
transmission of the duplicate acknowledgements until it is sure it is
being tested will leave an obvious pattern of acknowledgements that
the sender can identify. Because a receiver is unlikely to be able
to differentiate this test from actual re-ordering events, the
receiver will be forced to behave in the same fashion for any re-
ordered packet even in the absence of a test, making it continually
appear to have longer RTT.
6.2.3. RTT Measurement Considerations
Clearly, if the sender has re-ordered segment N, it cannot use it to
take an accurate RTT measurement. However it is desirable to ensure
that, during a test, the sender still measures the RTT of the flow.
One of the key aspects of this test is that the only way for an
actually dishonest receiver to cheat the test is to delay sending
acknowledgements until it is certain a test is happening. If
accurate RTTs can be measured during a test, this delay will cause a
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dishonest receiver to suffer an increase in RTT and thus a reduction
in data throughput.
Measurement of the RTT usually depends on receiving an
acknowledgement for a segment and measuring the delay between when
the segment was sent and when the acknowledgement arrives. The TCP
timestamp option is often used to provide accurate RTT measurement
but again, this is not going to function correctly during the test
phase. During a test therefore, the RTT has to be estimated using
the arrival of duplicate acknowledgements. Figure 4 shows how one
can measure the RTT in this way, and also demonstrates how this will
increase if a dishonest sender chooses to cheat. However it is not
sufficient simply to measure a single RTT during the test.
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|`--._ |
,--|`--._`--._ | +----------------------------+
| C |`--._`--._`--._ | | Segment N is delayed by 3 |
| h |`--._`--._`--._`--._ | | segments. This triggers 3 |
| e |`--._`--._`--._`--._`-N-1->| | duplicate acknowledgements |
| c | `--._`--._`--._`-N+1->| +----------------------------+
| k | `--._`--._`=N+2->|
| | `-=._`=N+3->| +----------------------------+
| R | _,--'_,- `=-N=->| | The RTT can be measured by |
| T | _,--'_,--'_,--'_,-' ,| | timing the gap between N+1 |
| T |<-N-1'_,--'_,--'_,--'_,--' | | being sent and the 1st |
`--|<-N-1'_,--'_,--'_,--' | | duplicate acknowledgement |
|<-N-1'_,--'_,--' | | being received. |
|<-N-1'_,--' | +----------------------------+
|<-N+3' |
| |
|`--._ |
,--|`--._`--._ | +----------------------------+
| R |`--._`--._`--._ | | Segment N is delayed by 3 |
| T |`--._`--._`--._`--._ | | segments. The sender has |
| T |`--._`--._`--._`--._`-N-1->| | decided to cheat so it has |
| | `--._`--._`--._`-N+1->| | to wait until it gets sent |
| g | `--._`--._`=N+2->| | segment N. |
| r | `-=.`-N+3->| +----------------------------+
| e | _,--' `--N-->|
| a | _,--' ,| +----------------------------+
| t |<-N-1' _,--',| | Once N arrives it has to |
| e | | _,--'_,--',| | send a couple of duplicate |
| r | GAP _,--'_,--'_,--',| | acknowledgements so it |
| | | _,--'_,--'_,--' | | appears to be honest. This |
`--|<-N-1'_,--'_,--' | | will increase the RTT that |
|<-N-1'_,--' | | the sender is measuring. |
|<-N+3' | +----------------------------+
| |
Figure 4: Measuring the RTT during a test
6.2.4. Negative Impacts of the Test
It is important to be aware that keeping track of out-of-order data
segments uses some memory resources at the receiver. Clearly this
test introduces additional re-ordering to the network and
consequently will lead to receivers using additional resources. In
order to mitigate against this, any sender that implements the test
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should only conduct the test at relatively long intervals (of the
order of several RTTs).
6.2.5. Protocol Details for the Probabilistic Test
o Any TCP sender MAY check the compliance of its receivers using the
probabilistic test periodically and randomly. In particular, it
would be advantageous for any sender that is heavily loaded to
identify if it is being taken advantage of by non-compliant
receivers.
o The decision to test MUST be randomised and MAY be based on: the
current load on the sender; whether the receiver is undergoing a
congestion response; whether the receiver appears to have
different flow characteristics to the others; when the receiver
was last tested. The interval between tests SHOULD be relatively
long (order of several RTTs).
o To perform the test, the sender selects a segment N. The
transmission of this segment will be delayed by D places. D MUST
lie between 2 and K-2 exclusively where K is the current size of
the transmit window. D SHOULD lie between 3 and 6 inclusively
except in those circumstances when a receiver has failed to
respond as expected to an earlier test but the sender chooses not
to proceed to the deterministic test. D MUST be generated pseudo-
randomly and unpredictably. The actual delay SHOULD be such that
the receiver can't distinguish the test segment from the
background traffic. If there are less than D segments worth of
data in the send buffer then the test SHOULD be omitted.
o If K < 5, the sender should not conduct a compliance test.
o The sequence number N of the delayed segment MUST be recorded by
the sender as must the amount of delay D.
o The senders enters the test phase when it transmits segment N+1
instead of N.
o The sender MUST NOT use segment N to measure the RTT of the flow.
This is because it won't get a true acknowledgement for this
segment.
o The sender SHOULD use segment N+1 to measure the RTT using the
first duplicate acknowledgement it receives to calculate the RTT.
This is to ensure that a dishonest receiver will suffer from an
increased RTT estimate. The sender SHOULD continue checking the
RTT throughout the test period.
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o If the sender receives any duplicate acknowledgements during the
test phase it MUST check to see if they were generated by the
delayed segment (i.e. the acknowledged sequence number must be
that of the preceding segment). If they are generated to report
the missing segment N the sender SHOULD NOT react as if they are
an indication of congestion.
o If the sender receives an acknowledgement for a segment with a
sequence number between N and N+D inclusively it MUST treat this
as an indication of congestion and react appropriately.
o A sender stops being in the test phase when either it receives the
acknowledgement for segment N+D or when it has received at least D
duplicate acknowledgments, whichever happens sooner.
o If a sender in the test phase receives D or more duplicate
acknowledgements, then it MUST retransmit segment N and react as
if there is congestion as specified in [RFC2581]. This is to
allow for the possibility that segment N may be lost.
o If the sender is in the slow start phase it MUST move to
congestion avoidance as soon as it begins a test. It MAY choose
to return to slow start once the test is completed.
o If a sender is in the test phase and receives no duplicate
acknowledgements from the receiver it MUST treat this as
suspicious and SHOULD perform the more rigorous deterministic test
set out in Section 6.3.3.
o If a sender is in the test phase and the next segment to be
transmitted has either the FIN or RST bits set, then it must
immediately stop the test, and transmit segment N before
transmitting the FIN or RST segment.
o A sender MAY choose to monitor the pattern of acknowledgements
generated by a receiver. A dishonest receiver is likely to send a
distinctive pattern of duplicate acknowledgments during the test
phase. As they are unable to detect whether it is a test or not
they are also forced to behave the same in the presence of any
segment reordering caused by the network.
6.3. Deterministic Testing
If after one or more probabilistic tests the sender deems that a
receiver is acting suspiciously, the sender can perform a
deterministic test similar to the skipped segment scheme in
Section 5.1 above.
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6.3.1. Performing the Deterministic Test
In order to perform the deterministic test the sender again needs to
choose a segment, M to use for testing. This time the sender holds
back the segment until the receiver indicates that it is missing.
Once the receiver sends a duplicate acknowledgement for segment M-1
then the sender transmits segment M. In the meantime data
transmission should proceed as usual. If SACK is not in use, this
test clearly increases the delay in reporting of genuine segment
losses by up to a RTT. This is because it is only once segment M
reaches the receiver that it will be able to acknowledge the later
loss. Therefore, unless SACK is in use, the sender MUST
pessimistically perform a congestion response following the arrival
of 3 duplicate acknowledgements for segment M-1 as mandated in
[RFC2581].
6.3.2. Assessing the Deterministic Test
A dishonest receiver that is concealing segment losses will establish
that this isn't a probabilistic test once the missing segment fails
to arrive within the space of 1 congestion window. In order to
conceal the loss the receiver will simply carry on acknowledging all
subsequent data. The sender can therefore state that if it receives
an acknowledgement for a segment with a sequence number greater than
M before it has actually sent segment M then the receiver must either
be cheating or is very non-compliant.
It is important to be aware that a third party who is able to
correctly guess the initial sequence number of a connection might be
able to masquerade as a receiver and send acknowledgements on their
behalf to make them appear non-compliant or even dishonest. Such an
attack can be identified because an honest receiver will also be
generating a stream of duplicate acknowledgements until such time as
it receives the missing segment.
6.3.3. Protocol Details for the Deterministic Test
o If a sender has reason to suspect that a receiver is reacting in a
non-compliant manner to the probabilistic test it SHOULD perform
the more thorough deterministic test.
o To perform the deterministic test the sender MUST select a segment
M at random. The sender MUST store this segment in the buffer of
unacknowledged data without sending it and MUST record the
sequence number.
o If SACK is not being used, the receiver must pessimistically
perform a congestion response following the arrival of the first 3
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duplicate acknowledgments for segment M-1 as mandated in
[RFC2581].
o If the receiver sends an acknowledgement for a segment that was
sent after segment M should have been sent, but before segment M
is actually sent, then the receiver has proved its non-compliance.
The only possible exception to this is if the receiver is also
sending a correct stream of duplicate acknowledgements as this
implies that a third party is interfering with the connection.
o As soon as the first duplicate acknowledgement for segment M-1
arrives, segment M MUST be transmitted. The effective delay, D,
of segment M MUST be calculated and stored.
o If a sender is in the test phase and the next segment to be
transmitted has either the FIN or RST bits set, then it must
immediately stop the test, and transmit segment N before
transmitting the FIN or RST segment.
o Any subsequent acknowledgement for a segment between M and M+D
MUST be treated as an indication of congestion and responded to
appropriately as specified in [RFC2581].
6.4. Responding to Non-Compliance
Having identified that a receiver is actually being dishonest, the
appropriate response is to terminate the connection with that
receiver. If a sender is under severe attack it might also choose to
ignore all subsequent requests to connect by that receiver. However
this is a risky strategy as it might give an increased incentive to
launch an attack against someone by making them appear to be behaving
dishonestly. It also is risky in the current network where many
users might share a quite small bank of IP addresses assigned
dynamically to them by their ISP's DHCP server. A safer alternative
to blacklisting a given IP address might be to simply test future
connections more rigorously.
6.5. Possible Interactions With Other TCP Features
In order to be safe to deploy, this test must not cause any
unforeseen interactions with other existing TCP features. This
section looks at some of the possible interactions that might happen
and seeks to show that they are not harmful.
6.5.1. TCP Secure
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure] is a WG Internet Draft that provides a
solution to some security issues around the injection of spoofed TCP
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packets into a TCP connection. The mitigations to these attacks
revolve round limiting the acceptable sequence numbers for RST and
SYN segments. In order to ensure there is no unforeseen interaction
between TCP Secure and this test the test protocol has been specified
such that the test will be aborted if a RST segment is sent.
6.5.2. Nagle Algorithm
The Nagle algorithm [RFC0896] allows a TCP sender to buffer data
waiting to be sent until such time as it receives an acknowledgement
for the previous segment. This means that there is only ever one
segment in flight and as such this test should not be performed when
the Nagle algorithm is being used.
6.5.3. Delayed Acknowledgements
[RFC2581] allows for the generation of delayed acknowledgements for
data segments. However the tests in this document rely on triggering
the generation of duplicate acknowledgements. These must be
generated for every out of order packet that is received and should
be generated immediately the packet is received. Consequently these
mechanisms have no effect on the tests set out in this document.
6.5.4. Best Effort Transport Service
The Best Effort Transport Service (BETS) is one operating mode of the
Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS) [SCPS]. SCPS is a set
of communications protocols optimised for extremely high bandwidth-
delay product links such as those that exist in space. SCPS-TP (SCPS
- Tranpsort Protocol) is based on TCP and is an official TCP option
(number 20). The BETS option within SCPS-TP is designed to provide a
semi-reliable transport between endpoints. As such it doesn't
necessarily ACK data in the same manner as TCP and thus, if this
option has been negotiated on a link the tests described above should
not be used.
6.6. Possible Consequences of the Tests
Earlier in this document we asserted that these tests don't change
the TCP protocol. We make this assertion for two reasons. Firstly
the protocol can be implemented as a shim that sits between the TCP
and IP layers. Secondly the network and receiver are unable to
differentiate between a sender that implements these tests and a
sender where the IP layer re-orders packets before transmission.
However the tests might have some impact on the debugging of a TCP
implementation. It will also have an impact on debugging traces as
it creates additional reordering. The authors feel that these
effects are sufficiently minor to be safely ignored. If an author of
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a new TCP implementation wishes to be certain that they won't be
affected by the tests during debugging they simply need to ensure
that the sender they are connecting to is not undertaking the tests.
A potentially more problematic consequence is the potential increase
in packet reordering that this test might introduce. However the
degree of reordering introduced in the probabilistic test is strictly
limited. This should have minimal impact on the network as a whole
although this assertion would benefit from testing by the wider
Internet Community.
7. Comparison of the Different Solutions
The following table shows how all the approaches described in this
document compare against the requirements set out in Section 4.
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Requirement | Rand | ECN |Transp. | Stage 1 | Stage 2 |
| | skip |nonce | nonce | test | test |
| | segs | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Congestion | | | | | |
| Control | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| unaffected | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Utilise | | | | | |
| existing | Yes | No** | No | Yes | Yes |
| features | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Receiver | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| passive role | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| No negotiable |Yes * | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| TCP options | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Receiver | Yes | N/A | N/A | Yes | Yes |
| unaware | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Certain of | Yes | Yes | Yes | strong | Yes |
| non-compliance | | | |suspicion| |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
| Innocent rcvr. | | | | | |
| not adversely | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| affected | | | | | |
+----------------+------+------+--------+---------+---------+
* Safer when SACK is used
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** Currently Experimental RFC with no known available implementation
Table 1 Comparing different solutions against the requirements
The table highlights that the three existing schemes looked at in
detail in Section 5 all fail on at least two of these requirements.
Whilst this doesn't necessarily make them bad solutions it does mean
that they are harder to implement than the new tests presented in
this document.
8. Alternative Uses of the Test
Thus far, the two stage test process described in this document has
been examined in terms of being a test for compliance by a receiver
to the TCP protocol, specifically in terms of the protocol's reaction
to segment reordering. The probabilistic test however could also be
used for other test purposes. For instance the test can be used to
confirm that a receiver has correctly implemented TCP SACK. Because
the sender knows exactly which segments have been reordered, it can
confirm that the gaps in the data as reported by SACK are indeed
correct. The test could also be incorporated as part of a test suite
to test the overall compliance of new TCP implementations.
9. IANA Considerations
This memo includes no request to IANA.
10. Security Considerations
The two tests described in this document provide a solution to two of
the significant security problems that were outlined in [Savage].
Both these attacks could potentially cause major congestion of
senders own resources (by making them transmit at too high a rate)
and could lead to network congestion collapse through subverting the
correct reporting of congestion or by amplifying any DoS attack
[Sherwood]. The proposed solution cannot alone prevent misbehaving
senders from causing congestion collapse of the Internet. However,
the more widely it is deployed by trustworthy senders, the more these
particular attacks would be mitigated through ensuring accurate
reporting of segment losses. The more senders that deploy these
measures, the less likely it is that a misbehaving receiver will be
able to find a sender to fool into causing congestion collapse.
It should be noted that if a third party is able to correctly guess
the initial sequence number of a connection, they might be able to
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masquerade as a receiver and send acknowledgements on their behalf to
make them appear dishonest during a deterministic test.
Due to the wording of [RFC2581] a receiver wishing to establish
whether a probabilistic test is happening can keep their
acknowledgement clock running (thus maintaining transmission rate) by
generating pairs of duplicate acknowledgements for segments it
received prior to the gap in the data stream caused by the test.
This would allow a receiver to subsequently send any additional
duplicate acknowledgements that would be necessary to make it appear
honest. Such behaviour by a receiver would be readily apparent by
examining the pattern of the acknowledgements. Should receivers
prove able to exploit this to their advantage, there might be a need
to change some of the musts and shoulds laid out in Section 6.2.5.
[Savage] also identified a further attack involving splitting
acknowledgements into smaller parts. TCP is designed such that
increases in the congestion window are driven by the arrival of a
valid acknowledgement. It doesn't matter if this acknowledgement
covers all of a transmitted segment or not. This means a receiver
that divides all its acknowledgements into two will cause the
congestion window to open at twice the rate it would do otherwise.
The tests described above can't protect against that attack. However
there is a straightforward solution to this - every time the sender
transmits a new segment it increments a counter; every acknowledgment
it receives decrements that counter; if the counter reaches zero, the
sender won't increase its congestion window in response to a new
acknowledgement arriving. To comply with this document, senders MUST
implement a solution to this problem.
11. Conclusions
The issue of mutual trust between TCP senders and receivers is a
significant one in the current Internet. This document has
introduced a mechanism by which senders can verify that their
receivers are compliant with the current TCP protocol. The whole
process is robust, lightweight, elegant and efficient. The
probabilistic test might delay a congestion notification by a
fraction of a RTT, however this is compensated for by the protocol
reacting more rapidly to any such indication. The deterministic test
carries a greater risk of delaying congestion notification and
consequently the protocol mandates that a congestion response should
happen whilst performing the test. The two tests combine to provide
a mechanism to allow the sender to judge the compliance of a receiver
in a manner that both encourages compliant behaviour and proves non-
compliance in a robust manner. The most attractive feature of this
scheme is that it requires no active participation by the receiver as
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it utilises the standard behaviour of TCP in the presence of missing
data. The only changes required are at the sender.
As mentioned in the introduction, the tests described in this
document aren't intended to become a necessary feature for compliant
TCP stacks. Rather, the intention is to provide a safe testing
mechanism that a sender could choose to implement were it to decide
there is a need. If optimistic acknowledgements do start to become
widely exploited the authors of this draft feel it would be valuable
to have an IETF-approved test that can be used to identify non-
compliant receivers. In the mean-time these tests can be used for a
number of alternative purposes such as testing that a new receiver
stack is indeed compliant with the protocol and testing if a receiver
has correctly implemented SACK.
In the longer term it would be hoped that the TCP protocol could be
modified to make it robust against such non-compliant behaviour,
possibly through the incorporation of a cumulative transport layer
nonce as described in Section 5.3.
12. Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance and comments
they received from contributors to the TCPM mailing list. In
particular we would like to thank Mark Allman, Caitlin Bestler, Lars
Eggert, Gorry Fairhurst, John Heffner, Alfred Hoenes, David Mallone,
Gavin McCullagh, Anantha Ramaiah, Rob sherwood, Joe Touch and Michael
Welzl.
13. Comments Solicited
Comments and questions are encouraged and very welcome. They can be
addressed to the IETF TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions working
group mailing list <tcpm@ietf.org>, and/or to the authors.
14. References
14.1. Normative References
[RFC0793] Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
RFC 793, September 1981.
[RFC0813] Clark, D., "Window and Acknowledgement Strategy in TCP",
RFC 813, July 1982.
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Internet-Draft TCP Test Against Receiver Cheating November 2007
[RFC2018] Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and A. Romanow, "TCP
Selective Acknowledgment Options", RFC 2018, October 1996.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2581] Allman, M., Paxson, V., and W. Stevens, "TCP Congestion
Control", RFC 2581, April 1999.
14.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure]
Ramaiah, A., "Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-
Window Attacks", draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure-08 (work in
progress), February 2007.
[Piratla] Piratla, N., Jayasumana, A., and T. Banka, "On Reorder
Density and its Application to Characterization of Packet
Reordering", 2005.
[RFC0896] Nagle, J., "Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks",
RFC 896, January 1984.
[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.
[RFC2960] Stewart, R., Xie, Q., Morneault, K., Sharp, C.,
Schwarzbauer, H., Taylor, T., Rytina, I., Kalla, M.,
Zhang, L., and V. Paxson, "Stream Control Transmission
Protocol", RFC 2960, October 2000.
[RFC3168] Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and D. Black, "The Addition
of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP",
RFC 3168, September 2001.
[RFC3540] Spring, N., Wetherall, D., and D. Ely, "Robust Explicit
Congestion Notification (ECN) Signaling with Nonces",
RFC 3540, June 2003.
[RFC3714] Floyd, S. and J. Kempf, "IAB Concerns Regarding Congestion
Control for Voice Traffic in the Internet", RFC 3714,
March 2004.
[SCPS] CCSDS Secratariat, "Space Control Protocol Specification -
Transport Protocol", October 2006,
<http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/
714x0b2.pdf>.
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[Savage] Savage, S., Wetherall, D., and T. Anderson, "TCP
Congestion Control with a Misbehaving Receiver", 1999.
[Sherwood]
Sherwood, R., Bhattacharjee, B., and R. Braud,
"Misbehaving TCP Receivers Can Cause Internet-Wide
Congestion Collapse", 2005.
[VU102014]
Doherty, "Optimistic TCP Acknowledgements Can Cause Denial
of Service".
Authors' Addresses
Toby Moncaster
BT
B54/70, Adastral Park
Martlesham Heath
Ipswich IP5 3RE
UK
Phone: +44 1473 648734
Email: toby.moncaster@bt.com
Bob Briscoe
BT & UCL
B54/77, Adastral Park
Martlesham Heath
Ipswich IP5 3RE
UK
Phone: +44 1473 645196
Email: bob.briscoe@bt.com
Arnaud Jacquet
BT
B54/70, Adastral Park
Martlesham Heath
Ipswich IP5 3RE
UK
Phone: +44 1473 647284
Email: arnaud.jacquet@bt.com
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