Resilience of Deployed TCP to Blind Attacks Matthew Luckie Robert Beverly Tiange Wu CAIDA / UC San Diego Naval Postgraduate School CAIDA / UC San Diego
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Mark Allman kc claffy ICSI CAIDA / UC San Diego
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION As part of TCP’s steady evolution, recent standards recom- Despite the rich history of attacks against TCP [39, 37, mend mechanisms to protect against well-known weaknesses 31, 15], and subsequent counter-measures [6, 35, 32, 16], within TCP. Unfortunately, the adoption, configuration, and little recent empirical data exists on the current resilience deployment of fielded TCP improvements can be slow. In of deployed TCP implementations on the Internet. In this this work, we consider the resilience of deployed TCP imple- paper, we focus on attacks against TCP by a “blinded” at- mentations to blind in-window attacks, where an off-path tacker, i.e. an attacker that is off-path and does not observe adversary disrupts an established connection by sending a the TCP connection. Of particular interest is the vulnerabil- packet that the victim believes came from its peer, causing ity of critical infrastructure, including web servers, routers, data corruption or connection reset. We tested operating and switches. For example, long-lived BGP and OpenFlow systems (and middleboxes deployed in front) of webservers TCP sessions are well-known to be vulnerable [8, 12], while in the wild and found a quarter of connections vulnerable to recent work [15] demonstrates new blinded attacks that pol- in-window SYN and reset packets, 44.0% vulnerable to in- lute web caches.