A Look Back at “Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite”

Steven M. BellovinAT&T Labs—Research

bellovin@acm.org

Abstract

About fifteen years ago, I wrote a paper on security prob-lems in the TCP/IP protocol suite, In particular, I focused onprotocol-level issues, rather than implementation flaws. Itis instructive to look back at that paper, to see where my fo-cus and my predictions were accurate, where I was wrong,and where dangers have yet to happen. This is a reprint ofthe original paper, with added commentary.

1. Introduction

The paper “Security Problems in theTCP/IP Protocol Suite” was originally pub-lished in Computer Communication Re-view, Vol. 19, No. 2, in April, 1989. It was aprotocol-level analysis; I intentionally did notconsider implementation or operational is-sues. I felt—and still feel—that that was theright approach. Bugs come and go, and ev-eryone’s operational environment is different.But it’s very hard to fix protocol-level prob-lems, especially if you want to maintain com-patibility with the installed base.

This paper is a retrospective on my orig-inal work. New commentary is shown in-dented, in a sans serif font. The originaltext is otherwise unchanged, except for pos-sible errors introduced when converting itfrom troff to LATEX. I’ve left the references in-tact, too, even if there are better versionstoday. The reference numbers and pag-ination are, of course, different; the sec-tion numbers remain the same, except fora new “Conclusions” section. As a gen-eral rule, the commentary follows the sectionit’s discussing.

It helps to understand where this papercame from. When I started work at Bell LabsMurray Hill in 1982, I assumed ownership of

1 1

2of the first three pieces of Ethernet ca-

ble in all of AT&T, then a giant monopoly tele-phone company. My lab had one cable, an-other lab had a second, and a “backbone”linked the two labs. That backbone grew, asother labs connected to it. Eventually, wescrounged funds to set up links to other BellLabs locations; we called the resuling net-work the “Bell Labs Internet” or the “R&D In-ternet”, the neologism “Intranet” not havingbeen invented.

Dedicated routers were rare then; we gen-erally stuck a second Ethernet board into aVAX or a Sun and used it to do the routing.This mean that the routing software (we usedBerkeley’s routed) was accessible to systemadministrators. And when things broke, weoften discovered that it was a routing prob-lem: someone had misconfigured their ma-chine. Once, we found that someone hadplugged a new workstation into the MurrayHill backbone, rather than into his depart-ment’s network; worse yet, the (proprietary)address assignment software on his machinedidn’t see any (proprietary) address assign-ment servers on that network, so it allocated.1—the gatewayy router—to itself. These twosituations worried me; it was clear that any-thing that could happen by accident could bedone deliberately, possibly with serious con-sequences.

Several other things focused my atten-tion on security even more. One was RobertMorris’ discovery of sequence numberguessing attacks; these are discussed ex-tensively below. Another was the “ShadowHawk” incident—a teenager broke into var-ious AT&T computers [2]. He was detectedwhen he tried to use uucp to grab pass-word files from various Research machines;a number of us had installed detectors for ex-actly that sort of activity, and noticed the un-

usual behavior. At that, we were lucky—mostof the connectivity within AT&T was via theproprietary Datakit network, which he didn’tknow how to exploit.

By the time of the Internet worm of 1988,this paper was already in substantially its cur-rent form. The result was an analysis (to thebest of my ability; I was relatively new to se-curity at the time) of protocol-level problemsin TCP/IP.

The original paper was criticized in [54].Some of the criticisms were valid; some, inmy opinion, were not. At the time, I chosenot to publish a detailed rebuttal; I will notdo so here. I have, where appropriate, notedwhere my analysis was especially incorrect. Idid and do feel that my conclusions were sub-stantially correct.

The TCP/IP protocol suite [41, 21] which is very widelyused today, was developed under the sponsorship of the De-partment of Defense. Despite that, there are a number of se-rious security flaws inherent in the protocols. Some of theseflaws exist because hosts rely on IP source address for au-thentication; the Berkeley “r-utilities” [22] are a notable ex-ample. Others exist because network control mechanisms,and in particular routing protocols, have minimal or non-existent authentication.

When describing such attacks, our basic assumption isthat the attacker has more or less complete control oversome machine connected to the Internet. This may be dueto flaws in that machine’s own protection mechanisms, or itmay be because that machine is a microcomputer, and inher-ently unprotected. Indeed, the attacker may even be a roguesystem administrator.

1.1. Exclusions

We are not concerned with flaws in particular implemen-tations of the protocols, such as those used by the Internet“worm” [95, 90, 38] Rather, we discuss generic problemswith the protocols themselves. As will be seen, careful im-plementation techniques can alleviate or prevent some ofthese problems. Some of the protocols we discuss are de-rived from Berkeley’s version of the UNIX system; othersare generic Internet protocols.

We are also not concerned with classic network attacks,such as physical eavesdropping, or altered or injected mes-sages. We discuss such problems only in so far as they arefacilitated or possible because of protocol problems.

For the most part, there is no discussion here ofvendor-specific protocols. We do discuss some prob-lems with Berkeley’s protocols, since these have be-

come de facto standards for many vendors, and not just forUNIX systems.

One of the criticisms in [54]) was that Ihad lumped Berkeley-specific protocols to-gether with standardized protocols describedin RFCs. It’s quite clear from the preceed-ing paragraph that I understood the differ-ence. However, the use of address-basedauthentication—a major flaw that I criti-cize throughout the paper—was peculiar toBerkeley’s software; I did not make that dis-tinction clear. It is indeed a bad way to do au-thentication, but it was not blessed by anyofficial standard.

2. TCP Sequence Number Prediction

One of the more fascinating security holes was first de-scribed by Morris [70]. Briefly, he used TCP sequence num-ber prediction to construct a TCP packet sequence withoutever receiving any responses from the server. This allowedhim to spoof a trusted host on a local network.

The normal TCP connection establishment sequence in-volves a 3-way handshake. The client selects and transmitsan initial sequence number ISNC , the server acknowledgesit and sends its own sequence number ISNS , and the clientacknowledges that. Following those three messages, datatransmission may take place. The exchange may be shownschematically as follows:

C → S : SYN(ISNC)

S → C : SYN(ISNS), ACK(ISNC)

C → S : ACK(ISNS)

C → S : dataand/or

S → C : data

That is, for a conversation to take place, C must first hearISNS , a more or less random number.

Suppose, though, that there was a way for an intruder X

to predict ISNS . In that case, it could send the following se-quence to impersonate trusted host T :

X → S : SYN(ISNX), SRC = T

S → T : SYN(ISNS), ACK(ISNX)

X → S : ACK(ISNS), SRC = T

X → S : ACK(ISNS), SRC = T, nasty − data

Even though the message S → T does not go to X , X

was able to know its contents, and hence could send data.If X were to perform this attack on a connection that al-lows command execution (i.e., the Berkeley rsh server), ma-licious commands could be executed.

How, then, to predict the random ISN? In Berkeley sys-tems, the initial sequence number variable is incrementedby a constant amount once per second, and by half thatamount each time a connection is initiated. Thus, if one ini-tiates a legitimate connection and observes the ISNS used,one can calculate, with a high degree of confidence, ISN′

S

used on the next connection attempt.Morris points out that the reply message

S → T : SYN(ISNS), ACK(ISNX)

does not in fact vanish down a black hole; rather, the realhost T will receive it and attempt to reset the connection.This is not a serious obstacle. Morris found that by im-personating a server port on T , and by flooding that portwith apparent connection requests, he could generate queueoverflows that would make it likely that the S → T mes-sage would be lost. Alternatively, one could wait until T

was down for routine maintenance or a reboot.

I mischaracterized Morris’ paper on thispoint. While flooding can work—without ex-plicitly stating it, I anticipated the denialof service attacks that started occurring in1996—Morris in fact exploited an imple-mentation error in the Berkeley kernel toaccomplish his goal with many fewer pack-ets. That flaw (described in [10] as well asin Morris’ paper) received very little atten-tion at the time, and was not fixed until manyyears later.

For that matter, sequence number attacksreceived little attention outside of my pa-per, until Kevin Mitnick reimplemented Mor-ris’ idea and used it to attack Tsutomu Shi-momura [93]. Shimomura then proceeded totrack down Mitnick.

A variant on this TCP sequence number attack, not de-scribed by Morris, exploits the netstat [86] service. In thisattack, the intruder impersonates a host that is down. If net-stat is available on the target host, it may supply the nec-essary sequence number information on another port; thiseliminates all need to guess.1

The Berkeley implementation of netstat wasdangerous, but not for the reasons that I gavehere. It did list the open ports on the machine,as well as all current connections; both itemsare very valuable to would-be attackers. In-deed, discovering the former is a major pieceof functionality of many attack tools. Fortu-nately, even in 1989 netstat was not available

1 The netstat protocol is obsolete, but is still present on some Internethosts. Security concerns were not behind its elimination.

by default on any 4.2BSD or 4.3BSD systems.There were still TOPS-20 systems on the netat that time; those systems had a vulnera-ble netstat, a fact I refrained from mentioningfor fear of pointing attackers at targets. Ac-tual output is shown in Figure 1.

There are several salient points here. Thefirst, of course, which I stressed at the time,is that address-based authentication is veryvulnerable to attack. I will return to this pointlater. A second point is a threat I mentionlater, but not in this context: if you know thesequence numbers of an active session, youcan hijack it. This attack was implemented afew years later by Joncheray [53].

A more important point (and this is onemade in [54]) is that the r-utilities are implic-itly relying on TCP sequence numbers—andhence on TCP session correctness—for se-curity properties. However, TCP was neverdesigned to be a secure protocol, nor werethere ever any guarantees about the proper-ties of the sequence number. The underly-ing issue is this: what properties of a layerare “exported” to a higher layer? Assumingtoo much at any higher later is a mistake; itcan lead to correctness failurs as well as tosecurity failures. For that matter, it is neces-sary to inquire even more closely, even of se-quence numbers in a security protocol: whatproperties are they guaranteed to have? Arethey simply packet sequence numbers, orcan they be used as, say, the initializationvector for counter mode encryption [35]?

Was there a security problem? Yes, therecertainly was, as demonstrated graphicallya few years later in the Mitnick vs. Shimo-mura incident. But the architectural flaw wasthe assumption that TCP sequence num-bers had security properties which they didnot. (Ironically, I have Heard that analyses ofthe security properties of sequence numberswere, in fact, done in the classified world—and they concluded that such attacks werenot feasible. . . )

The sequence number attack story isn’tover. In 2004, Watson observed that TCPreset packets were honored if the RST bitwas set on a packet whose initial sequencenumber was anywhere within the receive win-dow (see US-CERT Technical Cyber SecurityAlert TA04-111A). On modern systems, thereceive window is ofen 32K bytes or more,

JCN STATE LPORT FPORT FGN-HOST R-SEQUENCE S-SEQUENCE SENDW0,-1 -3-.EST.OOPA--- 15 2934 ATT.ARPA 333888001 760807425 40966,6 FIN.FIN.--P---- 15 0 0,0,0,0 0 0 06,5 FIN.FIN.--P---- 79 0 0,0,0,0 0 0 00,21 -3-.EST.O-PAV-- 23 4119 26,1,0,16 2928942175 701235845 3190,2 -3-.EST.O-PAV-- 23 1792 192,33,33,115 739613342 660542923 4096

Figure 1. Output from a TOPS-20 netstat command. Note the “send” and ”‘receive” sequence num-bers. The first line in the status display is the session I used to retrieve the data.

which means that it takes less than 217 tri-als to generate such a packet via a blind at-tack. That sounds like a lot of packets, and it’sonly a denial of service attack, but for long-lived sessions (and in particular for BGP [84]sessions between routers), it’s quite a feasi-ble attack. Furthermore, tearing down a sin-gle BGP session has wide-spread effects onthe global Internet routing tables.

Defenses

Obviously, the key to this attack is the relatively coarserate of change of the initial sequence number variable onBerkeley systems. The TCP specification requires that thisvariable be incremented approximately 250,000 times persecond; Berkeley is using a much slower rate. However, thecritical factor is the granularity, not the average rate. Thechange from an increment of 128 per second in 4.2BSD to125,000 per second in 4.3BSD is meaningless, even thoughthe latter is within a factor of two of the specified rate.

Let us consider whether a counter that operated at a true250,000 hz rate would help. For simplicity’s sake, we willignore the problem of other connections occurring, and onlyconsider the fixed rate of change of this counter.

To learn a current sequence number, one must send aSYN packet, and receive a response, as follows:

X → S : SYN(ISNX)

S → X : SYN(ISNS), ACK(ISNX) (1)

The first spoof packet, which triggers generation of the nextsequence number, can immediately follow the server’s re-sponse to the probe packet:

X → S : SYN(ISNX), SRC = T (2)

The sequence number ISNS used in the response

S → T : SYN(ISNS), ACK(ISNX)

is uniquely determined by the time between the originationof message (1) and the receipt at the server of message (2).But this number is precisely the round-trip time between X

and S. Thus, if the spoofer can accurately measure (and pre-dict) that time, even a 4 µ-second clock will not defeat thisattack.

How accurately can the trip time be measured? If we as-sume that stability is good, we can probably bound it within10 milliseconds or so. Clearly, the Internet does not exhibitsuch stability over the long-term [64], but it is often goodenough over the short term.2 There is thus an uncertaintyof 2500 in the possible value for ISNS . If each trial takes5 seconds, to allow time to re-measure the round-trip time,an intruder would have a reasonable likelihood of succeed-ing in 7500 seconds, and a near-certainty within a day. Morepredictable (i.e., higher quality) networks, or more accuratemeasurements, would improve the odds even further in theintruder’s favor. Clearly, simply following the letter of theTCP specification is not good enough.

We have thus far tacitly assumed that no processing takesplaces on the target host. In fact, some processing does takeplace when a new request comes in; the amount of variabil-ity in this processing is critical. On a 6 MIPS machine, onetick—4 µ-seconds—is about 25 instructions. There is thusconsiderable sensitivity to the exact instruction path fol-lowed. High-priority interrupts, or a slightly different TCBallocation sequence, will have a comparatively large effecton the actual value of the next sequence number. This ran-domizing effect is of considerable advantage to the target. Itshould be noted, though, that faster machines are more vul-nerable to this attack, since the variability of the instructionpath will take less real time, and hence affect the incrementless. And of course, CPU speeds are increasing rapidly.

This suggests another solution to sequence number at-tacks: randomizing the increment. Care must be taken to usesufficient bits; if, say, only the low-order 8 bits were pickedrandomly, and the granularity of the increment was coarse,the intruder’s work factor is only multiplied by 256. A com-bination of a fine-granularity increment and a small randomnumber generator, or just a 32-bit generator, is better. Note,though, that many pseudo-random number generators are

2 At the moment, the Internet may not have such stability even over theshort-term, especially on long-haul connections. It is not comfortingto know that the security of a network relies on its low quality of ser-vice.

easily invertible [13]. In fact, given that most such genera-tors work via feedback of their output, the enemy could sim-ply compute the next “random” number to be picked. Somehybrid techniques have promise—using a 32-bit generator,for example, but only emitting 16 bits of it—but brute-forceattacks could succeed at determining the seed. One wouldneed at least 16 bits of random data in each increment, andperhaps more, to defeat probes from the network, but thatmight leave too few bits to guard against a search for theseed. More research or simulations are needed to determinethe proper parameters.

Rather than go to such lengths, it is simpler to use a cryp-tographic algorithm (or device) for ISNS generation. TheData Encryption Standard [73] in electronic codebook mode[74] is an attractive choice as the ISNS source, with a sim-ple counter as input. Alternatively, DES could be used inoutput feedback mode without an additional counter. Eitherway, great care must be taken to select the key used. Thetime-of-day at boot time is not adequate; sufficiently goodinformation about reboot times is often available to an in-truder, thereby permitting a brute-force attack. If, however,the reboot time is encrypted with a per-host secret key, thegenerator cannot be cracked with any reasonable effort.

Performance of the initial sequence number generator isnot a problem. New sequence numbers are needed only onceper connection, and even a software implementation of DESwill suffice. Encryption times of 2.3 milliseconds on a 1MIPS processor have been reported [12].

An additional defense involves good logging and alert-ing mechanisms. Measurements of the round-trip time—essential for attacking RFC-compliant hosts—wouldmost likely be carried out using ICMP Ping messages;a “transponder” function could log excessive ping re-quests. Other, perhaps more applicable, timing measure-ment techniques would involve attempted TCP connec-tions; these connections are conspicuously short-lived, andmay not even complete SYN processing. Similarly, spoof-ing an active host will eventually generate unusual types ofRST packets; these should not occur often, and should belogged.

After many years of thinking about it, I fi-nally came up with a a solution to classicalsequence number attacks. The scheme, de-scribed in RFC 1948 [10], used a crypto-graphic hash function to create a separatesequence number space for each “connec-tion”, a connection being defined per RFC791 [81] as the unique 4-tuple <localhost, lo-calport, remotehost, remoteport>. Thisscheme has not been adopted as widelyas I would like; my claim here that extraCPU load during TCP connection establish-ment was irrelevant was rendered obsolete

by the advent of very large Web servers. In-deed, maximum TCP connection rate is avital metric when assessing modern sys-tems.

Instead, many implementations use ran-dom ISNs or (especially) random increments.This has obvious negative effects on the cor-rectness of TCP in the presence of dupli-cate packets, a property that is guaranteed tohigher layers. (Also see the appendix of [52].)Worse yet, Newsham pointed out that by thecentral limit theorem, the sum of a sequenceof random increments will have a normal dis-tribution, which implies that the actual rangeof the ISNs is quite small. (see CERT Advi-sory CA-2001-09).

There are hybrid schemes that don’t fall tothese attacks, but the underlying message isthe same as it was in 1989: don’t rely on TCPsequence numbers for security.

Also worth noting is the suggestion that in-trusion detection system can play a role: theycan alert you to an attack that for some rea-son you can’t ward off.

3. The Joy of Routing

As noted at the beginng, routing problemswere one of the initial motivations for thiswork. For a fair number of years, though, Isaid that “the only attack I discussed in thispaper that hasn’t been seen in the wild isrouting attacks”. That’s no longer the case;the bad guys have caught up.

Abuse of the routing mechanisms and protocols is prob-ably the simplest protocol-based attack available. There area variety of ways to do this, depending on the exact routingprotocols used. Some of these attacks succeed only if the re-mote host does source address-based authentication; otherscan be used for more powerful attacks.

A number of the attacks described below can also beused to accomplish denial of service by confusing the rout-ing tables on a host or gateway. The details are straight-forward corollaries of the penetration mechanisms, and willnot be described further.

3.1. Source Routing

If available, the easiest mechanism to abuse is IP sourcerouting. Assume that the target host uses the reverse of thesource route provided in a TCP open request for return traf-fic. Such behavior is utterly reasonable; if the originator ofthe connection wishes to specify a particular path for some

reason—say, because the automatic route is dead—repliesmay not reach the originator if a different path is followed.

The attacker can then pick any IP source address de-sired, including that of a trusted machine on the target’s lo-cal network. Any facilities available to such machines be-come available to the attacker.

Again, I’m focusing here on address-basedauthentication. But I move on to more sub-tle routing attacks.

Defenses

It is rather hard to defend against this sort of attack. Thebest idea would be for the gateways into the local net to re-ject external packets that claim to be from the local net. Thisis less practical than it might seem since some Ethernet3

network adapters receive their own transmissions, and thisfeature is relied upon by some higher-level protocols. Fur-thermore, this solution fails completely if an organizationhas two trusted networks connected via a multi-organizationbackbone. Other users on the backbone may not be trustableto the same extent that local users are presumed to be, orperhaps their vulnerability to outside attack is higher. Ar-guably, such topologies should be avoided in any event.

Note that I’m alluding here to what are nowcalled “firewalls”. I’m not sure why I didn’t usethat word in this paper; I was using it in emailseveral years earlier.

A simpler method might be to reject pre-authorized con-nections if source routing information was present. Thispresumes that there are few legitimate reasons for usingthis IP option, especially for relatively normal operations.A variation on this defense would be to analyze the sourceroute and accept it if only trusted gateways were listed; thatway, the final gateway could be counted on to deliver thepacket only to the true destination host. The complexity ofthis idea is probably not worthwhile.

Newer versions of the r -utilities do, in fact, re-ject source-routed connections. But there’sa more subtle risk: though they reject theconnection attempt, an ACK packet is re-turned; this conveys the information neededto launch a sequence number attack.

The most common configuration to-day is to reject source-routed packets atborder routers, whether or not they fillother firewall-related roles. Source rout-ing is permitted on the backbone; ISPs

3 Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox Corporation.

use it to view paths from different van-tage points. Internally, such packets mayor may not be blocked; the question is ir-relevant for many organizations, since therise of Microsoft Windows and the rela-tive demise of UNIX-style remote login hasrendered the attack somewhat less interest-ing.

Some protocols (i.e., Berkeley’s rlogin and rsh) permitordinary users to extend trust to remote host/user combi-nations. In that case, individual users, rather than an entiresystem, may be targeted by source routing attacks.4 Suspi-cious gateways [69] will not help here, as the host beingspoofed may not be within the security domain protectedby the gateways.

Note the warning here against puttingtoo much trust in firewalls: they don’t de-fend against insider attacks.

3.2. Routing Information Protocol Attacks

The Routing Information Protocol [49], (RIP) is usedto propagate routing information on local networks, espe-cially broadcast media. Typically, the information receivedis unchecked. This allows an intruder to send bogus rout-ing information to a target host, and to each of the gate-ways along the way, to impersonate a particular host. Themost likely attack of this sort would be to claim a route to aparticular unused host, rather than to a network; this wouldcause all packets destined for that host to be sent to the in-truder’s machine. (Diverting packets for an entire networkmight be too noticeable; impersonating an idle work-stationis comparatively risk-free.) Once this is done, protocols thatrely on address-based authentication are effectively com-promised.

This attack can yield more subtle, and more serious, ben-efits to the attacker as well. Assume that the attacker claimsa route to an active host or workstation instead. All pack-ets for that host will be routed to the intruder’s machine forinspection and possible alteration. They are then resent, us-ing IP source address routing, to the intended destination.An outsider may thus capture passwords and other sensi-tive data. This mode of attack is unique in that it affectsoutbound calls as well; thus, a user calling out from the tar-geted host can be tricked into divulging a password. Most ofthe earlier attacks discussed are used to forge a source ad-dress; this one is focused on the destination address.

4 Permitting ordinary users to extend trust is probably wrong in anyevent, regardless of abuse of the protocols. But such concerns are be-yond the scope of this paper.

This and [77] are the earliest mentions ofrouting attacks in the literature. The at-tacks described here—abusing the rout-ing protocols for eavesdropping and/orpacket modification—remain a very seri-ous threat. Indeed, a National ResearchCouncil study [89] identified routing at-tacks as one of the two major threatsto the Internet. While there are propos-als to solve this problem (see, for example,[71, 56, 55]), nothing has been imple-mented; all of the proposed solutions havetheir drawbacks. Defense against routing at-tacks must still be considered a researchproblem.

Routing attacks have happened frequentlyby accident. In the most famous case, knownas the “AS 7007” incident, an ISP started ad-vertising that it had the best routes to most ofthe Internet. Even after they powered downtheir router, it took more than four hours forthe global routing tables to stabilize.

As suggested here, more subtle rout-ing problems are harder to diagnose. AT&T’sdial-up Internet service was knocked off theair for many hours when another ISP startedadvertising a route to a small, internal net-work. There are many other such incidentsas well.

Are malicious routing attacks happening?Yes, they are, and the culprits are a verylow life form: the spammers. In some cases,they’re hijacking a route, injecting spam, andthen withdrawing the route. The attack is hardto trace, because by the time someone no-tices it the source addresses of the email are(again) either non-existent or innocent.

Defenses

A RIP attack is somewhat easier to defend against thanthe source-routing attacks, though some defenses are simi-lar. A paranoid gateway—one that filters packets based onsource or destination address—will block any form of host-spoofing (including TCP sequence number attacks), sincethe offending packets can never make it through. But thereare other ways to deal with RIP problems.

Filtering out packets with bogus source ad-dresses would help against many forms of at-tack. Too few ISPs do it, even though it is arecommended practice [42].

One defense is for RIP to be more skeptical about theroutes it accepts. In most environments, there is no good

reason to accept new routes to your own local networks.A router that makes this check can easily detect intru-sion attempts. Unfortunately, some implementations rely onhearing their own broadcasts to retain their knowledge ofdirectly-attached networks. The idea, presumably, is thatthey can use other networks to route around local outages.While fault-tolerance is in general a good idea, the actualutility of this technique is low in many environments com-pared with the risks.

It would be useful to be able to authenticate RIP packets;in the absence of inexpensive public-key signature schemes,this is difficult for a broadcast protocol. Even if it were done,its utility is limited; a receiver can only authenticate the im-mediate sender, which in turn may have been deceived bygateways further upstream.

This paragraph summarizes the essential dif-ficulty in defending against routing attacks:the problem can originate with non-local ma-chines. That is, even if your routing link toyour neighbors is authenticated, they may bedeceived rather than dishonest.

More and more sites are starting to pro-tect their routing protocols against direct at-tacks. The most commonly used mechanismis described in [50], caveats on key selec-tion are given in [59]. Another mechanismis the so-called TTL Security Hack [45]: if apacket is supposed to originate on-link, sendit with a TTL of 255, and verify that on receipt.Any off-link packets will have passed throughat least one router which would have decre-mented the TTL.

Even if the local routers don’t implement defense mech-anisms, RIP attacks carry another risk: the bogus routingentries are visible over a wide area. Any router (as opposedto host) that receives such data will rebroadcast it; a sus-picious administrator almost anywhere on the local collec-tion of networks could notice the anomaly. Good log gen-eration would help, but it is hard to distinguish a genuineintrusion from the routing instability that can accompany agateway crash.

[104] analyzes how stable routes are to ma-jor name servers. The answer is encourag-ing: such routes change very infrequently..

3.3. Exterior Gateway Protocol

The Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) [65] is intendedfor communications between the core gateways and so-called exterior gateways. An exterior gateway, after go-ing through a neighbor acquisition protocol, is periodicallypolled by the core; it responds with information about the

networks it serves. These networks must all be part of itsautonomous system. Similarly, the gateway periodically re-quests routing information from the core gateway. Data isnot normally sent except in response to a poll; furthermore,since each poll carries a sequence number that must beechoed by the response, it is rather difficult for an intruderto inject a false route update. Exterior gateways are allowedto send exactly one spontaneous update between any twopolls; this, too, must carry the sequence number of the lastpoll received. It is thus comparatively difficult to interferein an on-going EGP conversation.

One possible attack would be to impersonate a secondexterior gateway for the same autonomous system. Thismay not succeed, as the core gateways could be equippedwith a list of legitimate gateways to each autonomous sys-tem. Such checks are not currently done, however. Even ifthey were, they could be authenticated only by source IP ad-dress.

A more powerful attack would be to claim reachabilityfor some network where the real gateway is down. Thatis, if gateway G normally handles traffic for network N ,and G is down, gateway G′ could advertise a route to thatnetwork. This would allow password capture by assortedmechanisms. The main defense against this attack is topo-logical (and quite restrictive): exterior gateways must be onthe same network as the core; thus, the intruder would needto subvert not just any host, but an existing gateway or hostthat is directly on the main net.

A sequence number attack, similar to those used againstTCP, might be attempted; the difficulty here is in predict-ing what numbers the core gateway is using. In TCP, onecan establish arbitrary connections to probe for informa-tion; in EGP, only a few hosts may speak to the core. (Moreaccurately, the core could only speak to a few particularhosts, though as noted such checks are not currently im-plemented.) It may thus be hard to get the raw data neededfor such an attack.

EGP was reasonably secure because of thevery restricted topologies it could deal with: asingle core that talked with a variety of stubnetworks. It couldn’t possibly work for today’sInternet, which is why it’s been replaced byBGP [84]. But loosening the restrictions hashad negative effects as well: BGP is easier toattack, since it’s conveying more complex in-formation.

I asserted in the original paper that it waspossible to filter addresses announced inrouting packets. That wasn’t done in 1989;today, however, major ISPs do filter adver-tisements from stub networks they talk to.But not all ISPs do that, and it’s not possi-

ble to do much filtering when talking to peersor transit ISPs.

3.4. The Internet Control Message Protocol

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) [79] isthe basic network management tool of the TCP/IP protocolsuite. It would seem to carry a rich potential for abuse. Sur-prisingly, ICMP attacks are rather difficult; still, there areoften holes that may be exploited.

The first, and most obvious target, is the ICMP Redirectmessage; it is used by gateways to advise hosts of betterroutes. As such it can often be abused in the same way thatRIP can be. The complication is that a Redirect messagemust be tied to a particular, existing connection; it cannotbe used to make an unsolicited change to the host’s routingtables. Furthermore, Redirects are only applicable within alimited topology; they may be sent only from the first gate-way along the path to the originating host. A later gatewaymay not advise that host, nor may it use ICMP Redirect tocontrol other gateways.

Suppose, though, that an intruder has penetrated a sec-ondary gateway available to a target host, but not the pri-mary one. (It may suffice to penetrate an ordinary host onthe target’s local network, and have it claim to be a gate-way.) Assume further that the intruder wishes to set up afalse route to trusted host T through that compromised sec-ondary gateway. The following sequence may then be fol-lowed. Send a false TCP open packet to the target host,claiming to be from T . The target will respond with its ownopen packet, routing it through the secure primary gateway.While this is in transit, a false Redirect may be sent, claim-ing to be from the primary gateway, and referring to the bo-gus connection. This packet will appear to be a legitimatecontrol message; hence the routing change it contains willbe accepted. If the target host makes this change to its globalrouting tables, rather than just to the per-connection cachedroute, the intruder may proceed with spoofing host T .

Some hosts do not perform enough validity checks onICMP Redirect messages; in such cases, the impact of thisattack becomes similar to RIP-based attacks.

ICMP may also be used for targeted denial of serviceattacks. Several of its messages, such as Destination Un-reachable and Time to Live Exceeded, may be used to resetexisting connections. If the intruder knows the local and re-mote port numbers of a TCP connection, an ICMP packetaimed at that connection may be forged.5 Such informationis sometimes available through the netstat service.

A more global denial of service attack can be launchedby sending a fraudulent Subnet Mask Reply message. Some

5 In fact, such programs are available today; they are used as adminis-trative tools to reset hung TCP connections.

hosts will accept any such message, whether they have senta query or not; a false one could effectively block all com-munications with the target host.

Defenses

Most ICMP attacks are easy to defend against with justa modicum of paranoia. If a host is careful about checkingthat a message really does refer to a particular connection,most such attacks will not succeed. In the case of TCP, thisincludes verifying that the ICMP packet contains a plausi-ble sequence number in the returned-packet portion. Thesechecks are less applicable to UDP, though.

A defense against Redirect attacks merits additional at-tention, since such attacks can be more serious. Probably,the best option is to restrict route changes to the specifiedconnection; the global routing table should not be modifiedin response to ICMP Redirect messages.6

Finally, it is worth considering whether ICMP Redirectsare even useful in today’s environment. They are only us-able on local networks with more than one gateway to theoutside world. But it is comparatively easy to maintain com-plete and correct local routing information. Redirect mes-sages would be most useful from the core gateways to lo-cal exterior gateways, as that would allow such local gate-ways to have less than complete knowledge of the Internet;this use is disallowed, however.

Subnet Mask attacks can be blocked if the Reply packetis honored only at the appropriate time. In general, a hostwants to see such a message only at boot time, and onlyif it had issued a query; a stale reply, or an unsolicited re-ply, should be rejected out of hand. There is little defenseagainst a forged reply to a genuine Subnet Mask query, as ahost that has sent such a query typically has few resourceswith which to validate the response. If the genuine responseis not blocked by the intruder, though, the target will receivemultiple replies; a check to ensure that all replies agreewould guard against administrative errors as well.

ICMP attacks against routing have neverbeen very real. Anyone with the ability launchsuch an attack can use ARP-spoofing muchmore easily; that, in fact, has been done.

Early RFCs suggested that routers couldalso listen to ICMP Redirect messages; alater document [44] permits routers to ignoresuch packets if directed to them. Routers,almost by definition, run routing protocols,

6 This has other benefits as well, especially in environments whereICMP-initiated route changes are not timed out. The author has seensituations where RIP instability following a gateway crash has led toerroneous ICMP Redirect messages. These had the effect of perma-nently corrupting the routing tables on other hosts.

which gives them a much better idea of topol-ogy; hosts, by contrast, should not listen torouting traffic. (This contradicts advice I gavein 1989.) That said, there is a current trendtowards hosts that know more about the net-work topology.

The paper mentions a number of denialof service attacks that could be launched bysending spurious ICMP error packets. Thosebecame reasonably common in the early andmid-1990s. But as systems started comply-ing with the advice in RFC 1122 [1], that trenddied down; [1] mandates that most ICMP er-rors be treated as advisory messages, ratherthan fatal errors.

4. The “Authentication” Server

As an alternative to address-based authentication, someimplementations use the Authentication Server [96] Aserver that wishes to know the identity of its client maycontact the client host’s Authentication Server.7 and ask itfor information about the user owning a particular connec-tion. This method is inherently more secure than simpleaddress-based authentication, as it uses a second TCP con-nection not under control of the attacker. It thus candefeat sequence number attacks and source routing at-tacks. There are certain risks, however.

The first, and most obvious, is that not all hosts are com-petent to run authentication servers. If the client host is notsecure, it does not matter who the user is claimed to be; theanswer cannot be trusted. Second, the authentication mes-sage itself can be compromised by routing table attacks. IfRIP has been used to alter the target’s idea of how to reachsome host, the authentication query will rely on the same al-tered routing data. Finally, if the target host is down, a vari-ant on the TCP sequence number attack may be used; afterthe server sends out a TCP open request to the presumed au-thentication server, the attacker can complete the open se-quence and send a false reply. If the target runs a netstatserver, this is even easier; as noted, netstat will often sup-ply the necessary sequence numbers with no need to guess.

A less-obvious risk is that a fake authentication servercan always reply “no”. This constitutes a denial of serviceattack.

Defenses

A server that wishes to rely on another host’s idea of auser should use a more secure means of validation, such as

7 The Internet Activities Board does not currently recommend the Au-thentication Server for implementation [14]. However, the decisionwas not made because of security problems [80].

the Needham-Schroeder algorithm [75, 28, 76]. TCP by it-self is inadequate.

The original paper strongly suggestedthat the authentication server was a badidea. Unfortunately, it has been modern-ized [98] and is still used today. Fortu-nately, its primary use is for auditing (es-pecially of email), rather than authentica-tion; even so, the weaknesses outlinedhere (as well as in the Security Consid-erations section of [98] remain. Indeed,I personally run a readily-available im-plementation that replies to all querieswith the message “ident-is-a-completely-pointless-protocol-that-offers-no-security-or-traceability-at-all-so-take-this-and-log-it!”

5. Here be Dragons

Some protocols, while not inherently flawed, are never-theless susceptible to abuse. A wise implementor would dowell to take these problems into account when providing theservice.

5.1. The “Finger” Service

Many systems implement a finger service [48]. Thisserver will display useful information about users, such astheir full names, phone numbers, office numbers, etc. Un-fortunately, such data provides useful grist for the mill ofa password cracker [46]. By running such a service, a sys-tem administrator is giving away this data.

It is debatable whether or not this is an archi-tectural problem or an implementation prob-lem. The RFC never says precisely whatinformation shoudl be returned, though thesamples do show full names and a few phonenumbers. The precise question is generallymoot today for external attacks—firewalls willgenerally block the finger protocol—but mod-ern Web servers often release the same sortof information. Search engines yield evenmore data. Is password-guessing still use-ful to attackers? Beyond question, yes; I’veseen new implementations within the last fewmonths.

5.2. Electronic Mail

Electronic mail is probably the most valuable service onthe Internet. Nevertheless, it is quite vulnerable to misuse.

As normally implemented [24, 82], the mail server pro-vides no authentication mechanisms. This leaves the doorwide open to faked messages. RFC 822 does support an En-crypted header line, but this is not widely used. (However,see RFC 1040 [60] for a discussion of a proposed new en-cryption standard for electronic mail.)

Authenticating and encrypting email have be-come far more important today than in 1989.There is still no widely-deployed method ofauthenticating email; one is likely to be de-ployed in the near future, though arguablyfor the wrong reason. Spammers and “phish-ers” use fake email addresses; there are anumber of proposals on the table to some-how authenticate the source of the email.But they won’t work. The problem is that au-thentication proves an identity ; it says noth-ing of whether or not that party is autho-rized to send you email. Most people are will-ing to accept email from anyone; spammerscan and do claim to be sending email fromsites like asdfghij.com, and they’re right: thatis their email address. What does authentica-tion prove?

It may slow down the phishers slightly,but only slightly. True, if email were authenti-cated they could no longer claim to be Your-RealBank.com, but they could claim tobe E-YourRealBank.com, YourRealBank-Onilne.com, www-YourRealBank.com, etc.(The very first phishing attempt I know ofclaimed to be from paypa1.com—and it was.Of course, lots of people read that as pay-pal.com.)

Fake email has been used for other sin-ister purposes, such as stock market fraud:the perpetrator sent a message to an in-vestor’s newswire saying that wonderfulthings were happening to some com-pany. Naturally, its stock went up—and hesold at the peak. Digitally-signed press re-leases would prevent that sort of thing—if therecipients checked the signatures, the cer-tificates, etc., against some known-goodvalues.

Encrypting email is also useful in some sit-uations, and there are a number of choicesavailable [39, 5]. The practical problem is thatthe endpoints aren’t secure.

5.2.1. The Post Office Protocol The The Post Office Pro-tocol (POP) [15] allows a remote user to retrieve mail storedon a central server machine. Authentication is by means of

a single command containing both the user name and thepassword. However, combining the two on a single com-mand mandates the use of conventional passwords. Andsuch passwords are becoming less popular; they are too vul-nerable to wire-tappers, intentional or accidental disclosure,etc.

As an alternative, many sites are adopting “one-timepasswords”.8 With one-time passwords, the host and somedevice available to the user share a cryptographic key. Thehost issues a random challenge; both sides encrypt this num-ber, and the user transmits it back to the host. Since the chal-lenge is random, the reply is unique to that session, therebydefeating eavesdroppers. And since the user does not knowthe key—it is irretrievably stored in the device—the pass-word cannot be given away without depriving the user ofthe ability to log in.

The newest version of POP [87] has split the user nameand password into two commands, which is useful. How-ever, it also defines an optional mechanism for preauthenti-cated connections, typically using Berkeley’s mechanisms.Commendably, the security risks of this variant are men-tioned explicitly in the document.

POP3 [72] has gained in importance; it’s theprincple mechanism people use to retrieveemail from servers. Simple passwords arestill the most common authentication mech-anism; while a variant that uses SSL encryp-tion [85] is available, most people don’t use it.Another mail retrieval protocol, IMAP4 [23],has similar security properties: encryption isavailable but largely unused.

5.2.2. PCMAIL The PCMAIL protocol [58] uses au-thentication mechanisms similar to those in POP2. Inone major respect, PCMAIL is more dangerous: it sup-ports a password-change command. This request requiresthat both the old and new passwords be transmitted unen-crypted.

This protocol is no longer used.

5.3. The Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) [67, 68] provides fora distributed database mapping host names to IP addresses.An intruder who interferes with the proper operation of theDNS can mount a variety of attacks, including denial of ser-vice and password collection. There are a number of vulner-abilities.

In some resolver implementations, it is possible to mounta sequence number attack against a particular user. When

8 One-time passwords were apparently first used for military IFF (Iden-tification Friend or Foe) systems [29].

the target user attempts to connect to a remote machine, anattacker can generate a domain server response to the tar-get’s query. This requires knowing both the UDP port usedby the client’s resolver and the DNS sequence number usedfor the query. The latter is often quite easy to obtain, though,since some resolvers always start their sequence numberswith 0. And the former may be obtainable via netstat orsome analogous host command.

A combined attack on the domain system and the rout-ing mechanisms can be catastrophic. The intruder can inter-cept virtually all requests to translate names to IP addresses,and supply the address of a subverted machine instead; thiswould allow the intruder to spy on all traffic, and build anice collection of passwords if desired.

For this reason, domain servers are high-value targets; asufficiently determined attacker might find it useful to takeover a server by other means, including subverting the ma-chine one is on, or even physically interfering with its linkto the Internet. There is no network defense against the for-mer, which suggests that domain servers should only run onhighly secure machines; the latter issue may be addressedby using authentication techniques on domain server re-sponses.

The DNS, even when functioning correctly, can be usedfor some types of spying. The normal mode of operationof the DNS is to make specific queries, and receive spe-cific responses. However, a zone transfer (AXFR) requestexists that can be used to download an entire section of thedatabase; by applying this recursively, a complete map ofthe name space can be produced. Such a database representsa potential security risk; if, for example, an intruder knowsthat a particular brand of host or operating system has a par-ticular vulnerability, that database can be consulted to findall such targets. Other uses for such a database include espi-onage; the number and type of machines in a particular or-ganization, for example, can give away valuable data aboutthe size of the organization, and hence the resources com-mitted to a particular project.

Fortunately, the domain system includes an error codefor “refused”; an administrative prohibition against suchzone transfers is explicitly recognized as a legitimate rea-son for refusal. This code should be employed for zonetransfer requests from any host not known to be a legiti-mate secondary server. Unfortunately, there is no authen-tication mechanism provided in the AXFR request; sourceaddress authentication is the best that can be done.

Recently, a compatible authentication extension to theDNS has been devised at M.I.T. The Hesiod name server[36] uses Kerberos [99] tickets to authenticate queries andresponses. The additional information section of the querycarries an encrypted ticket, which includes a session key;this key, known only to Hesiod and the client, is used tocompute a cryptographic checksum of the both the query

and the response. These checksums are also sent in the ad-ditional information field.

The DNS remains a crucial weak spot in theInternet [89]. Other attacks have been foundin the intervening years.

I was told of the first shortly after this paperwas published. Though I had railed againstaddress-based authentication, in fact the r -utilities do name-based authentication: theylook up the hostname corresponding to theoriginator’s IP address, and use it to makean authentication decision. But given the wayhostname lookups work with the DNS, theowner of the IP address block involved con-trols what names are returned. Thus, if I own192.0.2.0/24, I can create a PTR record for,say, 192.0.2.1; this record would identify thehost as YourTrustedHost.com. There are noviolations of the DNS or r -utility protocols in-volved here, nor any tricky address spoofing.Instead, the attacker simply needs to lie.

The lesson is clear: when building securitysystems, understand exactly what elementsare being trusted. In this case, not only wastrust residing in the DNS (itself a problem),trust was residing in a piece of the DNS con-trolled by the enemy. The fix (against this par-ticular attack) was simple: use the returnedhostname and look up its IP address, andverify that it matches the address used in theconnection. Assuming that you control therelevant portion of the DNS tree, this foils theattack. Of course, and as noted above, usersare able to extend trust, possibly to a partof the DNS tree not controlled by someonetrustworthy.

Even without ill-advised trust, you’re rely-ing on the rest of the DNS. Cache contam-ination attacks [9] can create false entries.For that matter, the technical and administra-tive procedures used to update zones suchas .com can be subverted; that’s happened,too.

There are defenses against some of theDNS attacks. Filtering [20] can prevent cer-tain kinds of cache contamination attacks.Many popular implementations have beenhardened against sequence number attacks[102]. A comprehensive discussion of DNS-related threats can be found in [8].

I was wrong to laud Hesiod as a solu-tion to DNS security problems. Hesiod pro-tects the transmission and response; it

does not protect the data, and the respond-ing name server might itself have beendeceived. The right solution is DNSsec[37], which provides for digitally-signed re-source records. DNSsec deployment hasbeen very slow, partially because it wasso hard to get many of the design de-tails right; see, for example, [47, 4, 105],

5.4. The File Transfer Protocol

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) [83] itself is notflawed. However, a few aspects of the implementa-tion merit some care.

5.4.1. FTP Authentication FTP relies on a login andpassword combination for authentication. As noted, sim-ple passwords are increasingly seen as inadequate; moreand more sites are adopting one-time passwords. Noth-ing in the FTP specification precludes such an authentica-tion method. It is vital, however, that the “331” response toa USER subcommand be displayed to the user; this mes-sage would presumably contain the challenge. An FTP im-plementation that concealed this response could not be usedin this mode; if such implementations are (or become) com-mon, it may be necessary to use a new reply code toindicate that the user must see the content of the chal-lenge.

5.4.2. Anonymous FTP A second problem area is“anonymous FTP”. While not required by the FTP spec-ification, anonymous FTP is a treasured part of the oraltradition of the Internet. Nevertheless, it should be imple-mented with care.

One part of the problem is the implementation techniquechosen. Some implementations of FTP require creation ofa partial replica of the directory tree; care must be taken toensure that these files are not subject to compromise. Norshould they contain any sensitive information, such as en-crypted passwords.

The second problem is that anonymous FTP is trulyanonymous; there is no record of who has requested whatinformation. Mail-based servers will provide that data; theyalso provide useful techniques for load-limiting,9 back-ground transfers, etc.

FTP is hard to secure. It’s reasonablystraight-forward to encrypt the control chan-nel; protecting the data channels is harder,because they’re dynamic. Worse yet, a mali-cious FTP client can use the data channels

9 Recently, a host was temporarily rendered unusable by massive num-bers of FTP requests for a popular technical report. If this were delib-erate, it would be considered a successful denial of service attack.

to cause an innocent FTP server to attack athird host, in what’s known as a bounce at-tack. A security analysis of FTP (includingdetails of the bounce attack) can be foundin [7]; [51] describes cryptogprahic protec-tion for FTP.

5.5. Simple Network Management Protocol

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)[17] has recently been defined to aid in network manage-ment. Clearly, access to such a resource must be heavilyprotected. The RFC states this, but also allows for a null au-thentication service; this is a bad idea. Even a “read-only”mode is dangerous; it may expose the target host to net-stat-type attacks if the particular Management Infor-mation Base (MIB) [62] used includes sequence num-bers. (The current standardized version does not; however,the MIB is explicitly declared to be extensible.)

SNMP authentication, as originally de-fined, boils down to a simple plaintext pass-word known as the community string. All theusual problems with plaintext passwords ap-ply, including eavesdropping and guess-ability. SNMPv3 [18] defines a User-basedSecurity Model [92] with cryptographic au-thentication. In addition, new MIBs arecarefully scrutinized for security-sensitive el-ements: one proposal that would have putTCP sequence numbers into the MIB wascaught.

5.6. Remote Booting

Two sets of protocols are used today to boot disklessworkstations and gateways, Reverse ARP (RARP) [43] withthe Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) [94] and BOOTP[25] with TFTP. A system being booted is a tempting tar-get; if one can subvert the boot process, a new kernel withaltered protection mechanisms can be substituted. RARP-based booting is riskier because it relies on Ethernet-likenetworks, with all the vulnerabilities adhering thereto. Onecan achieve a modest improvement in security by ensur-ing that the booting machine uses a random number for itsUDP source port; otherwise, an attacker can impersonatethe server and send false DATA packets.

BOOTP adds an additional layer of security by includ-ing a 4-byte random transaction id. This prevents an at-tacker from generating false replies to a workstation knownto be rebooting. It is vital that these numbers indeed be ran-dom; this can be difficult in a system that is freshly pow-ered up, and hence with little or no unpredictable state. Careshould be taken when booting through gateways; the more

networks traversed, the greater the opportunity for imper-sonation.

The greatest measure of protection is that normally, theattacker has only a single chance; a system being booteddoes not stay in that state. If, however, communications be-tween the client and the standard server may be interrupted,larger-scale attacks may be mounted.

A newer boot-time protocol, DHCP [34] iseven more important. It provides hosts withIP addresses, DNS servers, default router,and more. Furthermore, DHCP queries canhappen with some frequency, if the leasetime of the address is short; this gives anattacker many more opportunities to do mis-chief.

There is a DHCP authentication option [3],but it is little-used. One reason is that anyonewho can mount a DHCP attack can launcha local network attack just as easily; merelyprotecting DHCP does little to protect theclient.

6. Trivial Attacks

A few attacks are almost too trivial to mention; neverthe-less, completeness demands that they at least be noted.

6.1. Vulnerability of the Local Network

Some local-area networks, notably the Ethernet net-works, are extremely vulnerable to eavesdropping andhost-spoofing. If such networks are used, physical ac-cess must be strictly controlled. It is also unwise to trustany hosts on such networks if any machine on the net-work is accessible to untrusted personnel, unless authenti-cation servers are used.

If the local network uses the Address Resolution Proto-col (ARP) [78] more subtle forms of host-spoofing are pos-sible. In particular, it becomes trivial to intercept, modify,and forward packets, rather than just taking over the host’srole or simply spying on all traffic.

It is possible to launch denial of service attacks by trig-gering broadcast storms. There are a variety of ways to dothis; it is quite easy if most or all of the hosts on the networkare acting as gateways. The attacker can broadcast a packetdestined for a non-existent IP address. Each host, upon re-ceiving it, will attempt to forward it to the proper destina-tion. This alone will represent a significant amount of traf-fic, as each host will generate a broadcast ARP query forthe destination. The attacker can follow up by broadcast-ing an ARP reply claiming that the broadcast Ethernet ad-dress is the proper way to reach that destination. Each sus-pectible host will then not only resend the bogus packet, it

will also receive many more copies of it from the other sus-pectible hosts on the network.

ARP attacks are easy to launch and hard tospot. End-to-end encryption can prevent theworst problems, but they remain a potent ve-hicle for denial of service attacks. This is be-ing addressed for IPv6 with the SEND en-hancements to IPv6 Neighbor Discovery, itsversion of ARP.

There are two modern venues whereARP attacks are particularly nasty. One ison wireless networks, especially in pub-lic hotspots. Another is using ARP to defeatthe presumed security properties of Ether-net switches. Some administrators assumethat using a switch prevents classical eaves-dropping; it does, but ARP can be used toredirect the traffic despite that.

Broadcast storms have been launchedmaliciously, but in a more dangerous fash-ion. The attacker sends an ICMP Echo Re-quest packet to the broadcast address ofsome local network; all hosts on that net-work send a reply to the originator of theICMP message. Of course, the source IP ad-dress in that packet isn’t that of the at-tacker; instead, it’s the address of the victim,who gets bombarded with enough Echo Re-ply messages to clog the link. Smurf attacks(see CERT Advisory CA-1998-01) have be-come relatively rare since the default routerconfigurations were changed to disable di-rected broadcasts [91].

6.2. The Trivial File Transfer Protocol

TFTP [94] permits file transfers without any attempt atauthentication. Thus, any publicly-readable file in the en-tire universe is accessible. It is the responsibility of the im-plementor and/or the system administrator to make that uni-verse as small as possible.

6.3. Reserved Ports

Berkeley-derived TCPs and UDPs have the notion of a“privileged port”. That is, port numbers lower than 1024may only be allocated to privileged processes. This restric-tion is used as part of the authentication mechanism. How-ever, neither the TCP nor the UDP specifications containany such concept, nor is such a concept even meaningful ona single-user computer. Administrators should never rely onthe Berkeley authentication schemes when talking to suchmachines.

Privileged ports are a bad idea, but theycould have been even worse. When FTPbounce attacks are launched, the sourceport is 21, in the privileged range. In otherwords, bounce attacks could have beenused to attack rlogin and rsh servers. For-tunately, out of a nagging sense of un-ease, those servers only accepted con-nections coming from ports in the range512–1023.

7. Comprehensive Defenses

Thus far, we have described defenses against a variety ofindividual attacks. Several techniques are broad-spectrumdefenses; they may be employed to guard against not onlythese attacks, but many others as well.

7.1. Authentication

Many of the intrusions described above succeed only be-cause the target host uses the IP source address for authen-tication, and assumes it to be genuine. Unfortunately, thereare sufficiently many ways to spoof this address that suchtechniques are all but worthless. Put another way, sourceaddress authentication is the equivalent of a file cabinet se-cured with an S100 lock; it may reduce the temptation levelfor more-or-less honest passers-by, but will do little or noth-ing to deter anyone even slightly serious about gaining en-try.

Some form of cryptographic authentication is needed.There are several possible approaches. Perhaps the best-known is the Needham-Schroeder algorithm [75, 28, 76].It relies on each host sharing a key with an authentica-tion server; a host wishing to establish a connection obtainsa session key from the authentication server and passes asealed version along to the destination. At the conclusionof the dialog, each side is convinced of the identity of theother. Versions of the algorithm exist for both private-keyand public-key [30] cryptosystems.

How do these schemes fit together with TCP/IP? One an-swer is obvious: with them, preauthenticated connectionscan be implemented safely; without them, they are quiterisky. A second answer is that the DNS provides an idealbase for authentication systems, as it already incorporatesthe necessary name structure, redundancy, etc. To be sure,key distribution responses must be authenticated and/or en-crypted; as noted, the former seems to be necessary in anyevent.

In some environments, care must be taken to use the ses-sion key to encrypt the entire conversation; if this is notdone, an attacker can take over a connection via the mecha-nisms described earlier.

Doing cryptography properly is a lot harderthan I made it seem. Indeed, the Needham-Schroeder scheme—the oldest crypto-graphic protocol in the open literature—wasfound in 1996 to be vulnerable to a new flaw[61]. That variant, expressed in modern no-tation, is only three lines long. . .

7.2. Encryption

Suitable encryption can defend against most of the at-tacks outlined above. But encryption devices are expensive,often slow, hard to administer, and uncommon in the civil-ian sector. There are different ways to apply encryption;each has its strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensivetreatment of encryption is beyond the scope of this paper;interested readers should consult Voydock and Kent [103]or Davies and Price [26]

Link-level encryption—encrypting each packet as itleaves the host computer—is an excellent method of guard-ing against disclosure of information. It also works wellagainst physical intrusions; an attacker who tapped in toan Ethernet cable, for example, would not be able to in-ject spurious packets. Similarly, an intruder who cut theline to a name server would not be able to imperson-ate it. The number of entities that share a given key de-termines the security of the network; typically, a keydistribution center will allocate keys to each pair of com-municating hosts.

Link-level encryption has some weaknesses, however.Broadcast packets are difficult to secure; in the absence offast public-key cryptosystems, the ability to decode an en-crypted broadcast implies the ability to send such a broad-cast, impersonating any host on the network. Furthermore,link-level encryption, by definition, is not end-to-end; se-curity of a conversation across gateways implies trust inthe gateways and assurance that the full concatenated inter-net is similarly protected. (This latter constraint may be en-forced administratively, as is done in the military sector.) Ifsuch constraints are not met, tactics such as source-routingattacks or RIP-spoofing may be employed. Paranoid gate-ways can be deployed at the entrance to security domains;these might, for example, block incoming RIP packets orsource-routed packets.

As pointed out in [54], I had Ethernet link en-cryptors in mind. Link encryptors on point-to-point links are quite different; they protecttraffic down to the bit level, sometimes hid-ing even the HDLC framing.

Many portions of the DARPA Internet employ forms oflink encryption. All Defense Data Network (DDN) IMP-to-IMP trunks use DES encryption, even for non-classified

traffic; classified lines use more secure cryptosystems [27].These, however, are point-to-point lines, which are compar-atively easy to protect.

A multi-point link encryption device for TCP/IP is theBlacker Front End (BFE) [40]. The BFE looks to the hostlike an X.25 DDN interface, and sits between the host andthe actual DDN line. When it receives a call request packetspecifying a new destination, it contacts an Access ControlCenter (ACC) for permission, and a Key Distribution Cen-ter (KDC) for cryptographic keys. If the local host is de-nied permission to talk to the remote host, an appropriatediagnostic code is returned. A special “Emergency Mode”is available for communications to a restricted set of desti-nations at times when the link to the KDC or ACC is notworking.

The permission-checking can, to some extent, protectagainst the DNS attacks described earlier. Even if a hosthas been mislead about the proper IP address for a particu-lar destination, the BFE will ensure that a totally unautho-rized host does not receive sensitive data. That is, assumethat a host wishes to send Top Secret data to some host foo.A DNS attack might mislead the host into connecting topenetrated host 4.0.0.4, rather than 1.0.0.1. If 4.0.0.4 is notcleared for Top Secret material, or is not allowed commu-nications with the local host, the connection attempt willfail. To be sure, a denial of service attack has taken place;this, in the military world, is far less serious than informa-tion loss.

The BFE also translates the original (“Red”) IP addressto an encrypted (“Black”) address, using a translation ta-ble supplied by the ACC. This is done to foil traffic anal-ysis techniques, the bane of all multi-point link encryptionschemes.

I got a lot wrong here (see [54] for somedetails), partly because of my lack of ex-perience with crypto at the time and partlybecause of the sketchy information publiclyavailable on Blacker. With the benefit of hind-sight (and a lot more experience with cryp-tography), I’d call the BFE a network-layerencryptor for non-broadcast multiple accessnetworks, rather than a multi-point link-levelencryptor. But Blacker was obsolescent evenas I wrote the original paper; SP3—the an-cestor of IPsec [57] —was being defined aspart of the Secure Data Network System. Re-gardless, the BFE (and SP3 and IPsec) allcreate virtual private networks, with their ownaddress spaces; while there is some protec-tion against traffic analysis, these technolo-gies do not prevent an adversary from notic-ing which protected networks are talking towhich other protected networks.

End-to-end encryption, above the TCP level, may beused to secure any conversation, regardless of the number ofhops or the quality of the links. This is probably appropriatefor centralized network management applications, or otherpoint-to-point transfers. Key distribution and managementis a greater problem, since there are more pairs of corre-spondents involved. Furthermore, since encryption and de-cryption are done before initiation or after termination ofthe TCP processing, host-level software must arrange forthe translation; this implies extra overhead for each suchconversation.10

End-to-end encryption is vulnerable to denial of serviceattacks, since fraudulently-injected packets can pass theTCP checksum tests and make it to the application. A com-bination of end-to-end encryption and link-level encryptioncan be employed to guard against this. An intriguing alter-native would be to encrypt the data portion of the TCP seg-ment, but not the header; the TCP checksum would be cal-culated on the cleartext, and hence would detect spuriouspackets. Unfortunately, such a change would be incompat-ible with other implementations of TCP, and could not bedone transparently at application level.

I wrote “link-level encryption” here; it shouldhave been “network-level”. But there’s a moresubtle problem: the TCP checksum is notcryptographically strong; it’s pretty easy tolaunch a variety of attacks against such aweak integrity protection mechanism. See,for example, [11].

Regardless of the method used, a major benefit of en-crypted communications is the implied authentication theyprovide. If one assumes that the key distribution center issecure, and the key distribution protocols are adequate, thevery ability to communicate carries with it a strong assur-ance that one can trust the source host’s IP address for iden-tification.

This implied authentication can be especially importantin high-threat situations. A routing attack can be used to“take over” an existing connection; the intruder can effec-tively cut the connection at the subverted machine, senddangerous commands to the far end, and all the while trans-late sequence numbers on packets passed through so as todisguise the intrusion.

Today’s network-level encryptors would foilthis; they protect the TCP (and sometimesIP) headers as well as the payload. I suspectthat the BFE would as well.

10 We are assuming that TCP is handled by the host, and not by a front-end processor.

It should be noted, of course, that any of these encryp-tion schemes provide privacy. Often that is the primary goalof such systems.

7.3. Trusted Systems

Given that TCP/IP is a Defense Department protocolsuite, it is worth asking to what extent the Orange Book[31] and Red Book [33] criteria would protect a host fromthe attacks described above. That is, suppose that a targethost (and the gateways!) were rated B1 or higher. Couldthese attacks succeed? The answer is a complex one, anddepends on the assumptions we are willing to make. In gen-eral, hosts and routers rated at B2 or higher are immune tothe attacks described here, while C2-level systems are sus-ceptible. B1-level systems are vulnerable to some of theseattacks, but not all.

In order to understand how TCP/IP is used in secure en-vironments, a brief tutorial on the military security model isnecessary. All objects in the computer system, such as filesor network channels, and all data exported from them, musthave a label indicating the sensitivity of the informationin them. This label includes hierarchical components (i.e.,Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret) and non-hierarchicalcomponents. Subjects —i.e., processes within the computersystem—are similarly labeled. A subject may read an ob-ject if its label has a higher or equal hierarchical level and ifall of the object’s non-hierarchical components are includedin the subject’s label. In other words, the process must havesufficient clearance for the information in a file. Similarly,a subject may write to an object if the object has a higheror equal level and the object’s non-hierarchical componentsinclude all of those in the subject’s level. That is, the sen-sitivity level of the file must be at least as high as that ofthe process. If it were not, a program with a high clearancecould write classified data to a file that is readable by a pro-cess with a low security clearance.

A corollary to this is that for read/write access to any file,its security label must exactly match that of the process. Thesame applies to any form of bidirectional interprocess com-munication (i.e., a TCP virtual circuit): both ends must haveidentical labels.

We can now see how to apply this model to the TCP/IPprotocol suite. When a process creates a TCP connection,that connection is given the process’s label. This label is en-coded in the IP security option. The remote TCP must en-sure that the label on received packets matches that of thereceiving process. Servers awaiting connections may be el-igible to run at multiple levels; when the connection is in-stantiated, however, the process must be forced to the levelof the connection request packet.

IP also makes use of the security option [97]. A packetmay not be sent over a link with a lower clearance level.

If a link is rated for Secret traffic, it may carry Unclassi-fied or Confidential traffic, but it may not carry Top Secretdata. Thus, the security option constrains routing decisions.The security level of a link depends on its inherent charac-teristics, the strength of any encryption algorithms used, thesecurity levels of the hosts on that network, and even thelocation of the facility. For example, an Ethernet cable lo-cated in a submarine is much more secure than if the samecable were running through a dormitory room in a univer-sity.

Several points follow from these constraints. First, TCP-level attacks can only achieve penetration at the level of theattacker. That is, an attacker at the Unclassified level couldonly achieve Unclassified privileges on the target system,regardless of which network attack was used.11 Incomingpackets with an invalid security marking would be rejectedby the gateways.

Attacks based on any form of source-address authentica-tion should be rejected as well. The Orange Book requiresthat systems provide secure means of identification and au-thentication; as we have shown, simple reliance on the IPaddress is not adequate. As of the B1 level, authenticationinformation must be protected by cryptographic checksumswhen transmitted from machine to machine.12

The authentication server is still problematic; it can bespoofed by a sequence number attack, especially if netstatis available. This sort of attack could easily be combinedwith source routing for full interactive access. Again, cryp-tographic checksums would add significant strength.

B1-level systems are not automatically immune fromrouting attacks; RIP-spoofing could corrupt their routing ta-bles just as easily. As seen, that would allow an intruder tocapture passwords, perhaps even some used on other trustedsystems. To be sure, the initial penetration is still restrictedby the security labelling, but that may not block future lo-gins captured by these means.

Routing attacks can also be used for denial of service.Specifically, if the route to a secure destination is changedto require use of an insecure link, the two hosts will not beable to communicate. This change would probably be de-tected rather quickly, though, since the gateway that noticedthe misrouted packet would flag it as a security problem.

At the B2 level, secure transmission of routing controlinformation is required. Similar requirements apply to othernetwork control information, such as ICMP packets.

Several attacks we have described rely on data de-rived from “information servers”, such as netstat and fin-

11 We are assuming, of course, that the penetrated system does not havebugs of its own that would allow further access.

12 More precisely, user identification information must be protected to anequal extent with data sensitivity labels. Under certain circumstances,described in the Red Book, cryptographic checks may be omitted. Ingeneral, though, they are required.

ger. While these, if carefully done, may not represent adirect penetration threat in the civilian sense, they are of-ten seen to represent a covert channel that may be used toleak information. Thus, many B-division systems do not im-plement such servers.

In a practical sense, some of the technical features wehave described may not apply in the military world. Ad-ministrative rules [32] tend to prohibit risky sorts of inter-connections; uncleared personnel are not likely to have evenindirect access to systems containing Top Secret data. Suchrules are, most likely, an accurate commentary on anyone’sability to validate any computer system of non-trivial size.

This is an odd section for this paper, in that itattempts a very brief look at a completely dif-ferent technology architecture: Orange Book-style secure systems. Worse yet, the Or-ange Book prescribes results, not methods;as such, it is difficult to find a precise matchbetween the attacks I described and abstractmechanisms.

In any event, the question is moot today.The Orange Book and its multi-hued kin havebeen replaced by the Common Criteria [19],an international effort at defining secure sys-tems. In most ways, the Common Criteria iseven more abstract than its DoD predeces-sor; one could not make meaningful state-ments without at least specifying what pro-tection profile one was interested in. (Apartfrom that, one can make a strong argumentthat that entire approach to system securityis flawed [89], but such a discussion is out ofscope for this paper.)

Two technical points are worth not-ing. First, routing attacks could be miti-gated by maintenance of separate rout-ing tables (by multi-level secure routers)for different security classifications. Sec-ond, exactly what forms of authenticationare acceptable in any situation would de-pend critically on detailed knowledge of ex-actly what sorts of hosts were connected towhat sorts of network. In other words, eaves-dropping may or may not be a concern.

8. Conclusions

Several points are immediately obvious from this anal-ysis. The first, surely, is that in general, relying on the IPsource address for authentication is extremely dangerous.13

13 There are some exceptions to this rule. If the entire network, and all ofits components (hosts, gateways, cables, etc.) are physically protected,

Fortunately, the Internet community is starting to acceptthis on more than an intellectual level. The Berkeley man-uals [22] have always stated that the authentication proto-col was very weak, but it is only recently that serious at-tempts (i.e., Kerberos [99] and SunOS 4.0’s DES authenti-cation mode [101]) have been made to correct the problem.Kerberos and SunOS 4.0 have their weaknesses, but bothare far better than their predecessor. More recently, an ex-tension to the Network Time Protocol (NTP) [66] has beenproposed that includes a cryptographic checksum [63].

A second broad class of problems is sequence numberattacks. If a protocol depends on sequence numbers—andmost do—it is vital that they be chosen unpredictably. It isworth considerable effort to ensure that these numbers arenot knowable even to other users on the same system.

We may generalize this by by stating that hosts shouldnot give away knowledge gratuitously. A finger server, forexample, would be much safer if it only supplied informa-tion about a known user, rather than supplying informa-tion about everyone logged on. Even then, some censor-ship might be appropriate; a refusal to supply the last logindate and other sensitive information would be appropriateif the account was not used recently. (Never-used accountsoften have simple default passwords. Infrequently-used ac-counts are often set up less carefully by the owner.) We havealso seen how netstat may be abused; indeed, the combina-tion of netstat with the authentication server is the singlestrongest attack using the standardized Internet protocols.

Finally, network control mechanisms are dangerous, andmust be carefully guarded. Static routes are not feasible in alarge-scale network, but intelligent use of default routes andverifiable point-to-point routing protocols (i.e., EGP) are farless vulnerable than broadcast-based routing.

9. Acknowledgments

Dave Presotto, Bob Gilligan, Gene Tsudik, and espe-cially Deborah Estrin made a number of useful suggestionsand corrections to a draft of this paper.

10. Retrospective Conclusions

The Internet of 1989 was a muchsimpler—and much friendlier—place than itis today. Most of the protocols I looked atwere comparatively simple client-server pro-tocols; today’s multi-party protocols—SIP[88], Diameter [16], various peer-to-peer pro-tocols, etc.—are much harder to analyze.

and if all of the operating systems are sufficiently secure, there wouldseem to be little risk.

Often, the crucial question is not authentica-tion but authorization: how do you know if acertain party is permitted to perform a cer-tain action?

The overall trend has been good. The In-ternet Engineering Task Force (IETF) willnot standardize protocols where the onlymandatory-to-implement form of authentica-tion is plaintext passwords; address-basedauthentication is acceptable only in very re-stricted circumstances. There are standard-ized and/or widely deployed cryptographicprotocols for remote login, sending and re-ceiving email, Web browsing, etc. As dis-cussed earlier, outing is the major exception;operationally, it is still not securable.

Most of the security problems we en-counter on the Internet today are due tobuggy code (including, of course, buggycode in cryptographic modules). To some ex-tent, of course, that’s because there areso many bugs; why launch a difficult at-tack when there’s so much low-hanging fruitavailable?

Password-guessing is still a common at-tack; indeed, a new wave of password-guessing has recently been observedagainst ssh [106], a cryptographically-protected replacement for the r -utilities.

There is no need to belabor the earlierconclusions that predictable sequence num-bers and address-based authentication arebad. This is now well-accepted; for example,the specification for a new transport protocol,SCTP [100], mandates strong random num-ber generation [6] for its analogous fields. Buthow does one design a secure protocol?

One answer is to look at data flow ofthe protocol. On what elements does au-thentication depend? Can an attacker tamperwith or mimic those elements? What are theguarantees, especially the security guaran-tees, of each element? Naturally, the powersof the attacker must be taken into account.Seen from this perspective, the flaws in ther -utilities are clear.

One more point should be mentioned: itis often the availability of auxiliary data thatmakes attacks possible. An attacker whocan create just one TCP connection can-not guess the correct sequence number.This is often a fruitful mechanism for block-ing (or at least detecting) attacks.

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