Great Circle Associates Firewalls
(October 1995)
 

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Subject: Re: Fragment overlay attacks?
From: Darren Reed <avalon @ coombs . anu . edu . au>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 00:41:41 +1000 (EST)
To: mulligan @ incog . com
Cc: sjg @ zen . void . oz . au, mischler @ Cubic . COM, dej @ eecg . toronto . edu, firewalls @ GreatCircle . COM
In-reply-to: <9510170519 . AA00830 @ future . incog . com> from "mulligan @ future . incog . com" at Oct 16, 95 11:19:15 pm

In some mail from mulligan @
 future .
 incog .
 com, sie said:
> 
> > > Maybe.  An attacker might be able to send what looks like an innocent
> > > IP & TCP header with the SYN bit clear and the ACK bit set (so it can
> > > get through an established connection filter), then follow it with a
> > > fragment with an offset of 1 (i.e. 8 bytes into the TCP header) and
> 
> Simon wrote:
> > This is easy to implement, but I have not yet seen a fragment
> > re-assembly implementation that would be fooled by this.  In BSD for
> > instance fragments have leading overlay trimmed and overwrite trailing
> > overlay.
> 
> It's true that the bsd seems to do the right thing with overlapping
> fragments, but if the reassembly routine was written to RFC791, then you
> will get the behavior described.  In the example reassembly procedure,
> in RFC791 (Internet Protocol) it says:
> 	"In the case that two or more fragments contain the same data
> 	either indentically or through a partial overlap, this procedure
> 	will use the more recently arrived copy in the data buffer in
> 	the data buffer and datagram delivered."

RFC791 has one suggestion for IP packet reassmebly.  Another can be found
in RFC815:
0815 IP datagram reassembly algorithms. D.D. Clark. Jul-01-1982.
     (Format: TXT=14575 bytes)

And RFC1122 (Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication Layers)
which has some more notes on this subject.

Also, consult the firewalls mailing list archives for detailed notes
(early June/late May - prior to Cisco's revelation) on this subject.

Darren


References:
Indexed By Date Previous: Re: Firewall1 Comparison -Reply
From: jim . brown @ ptech . com (Jim Brown)
Next: Re: Question: Telnet & Packet Filtering
From: Chris Tyler <chris @ dejong . com>
Indexed By Thread Previous: Re: Fragment overlay attacks?
From: mulligan @ future . incog . com
Next: DNS with ANS Interlock
From: Charles Kaplan <cbk @ ingress . com>

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