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Date:      Fri, 14 May 1999 07:25:46 +0200
From:      Harold Gutch <logix@foobar.franken.de>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>, Thamer Al-Herbish <shadows@whitefang.com>, security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Forwarded from BUGTRAQ: SYN floods against FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <19990514072546.A20779@foobar.franken.de>
In-Reply-To: <199905140438.VAA97604@apollo.backplane.com>; from Matthew Dillon on Thu, May 13, 1999 at 09:38:16PM -0700
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905131824250.267-100000@rage.whitefang.com> <4.2.0.37.19990513161529.00c1e3f0@localhost> <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905131824250.267-100000@rage.whitefang.com> <4.2.0.37.19990513202450.0444fca0@localhost> <199905140438.VAA97604@apollo.backplane.com>

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On Thu, May 13, 1999 at 09:38:16PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     The only way to mitigate the SYN flooding problem on the host side is to
>     greatly increase the size of the listen queue, but even this does not work
>     too well.
> 
What about the Linux way of doing it, that is by creating an
MD5-hash over the source- and destination IP and port and a
secret which is incremented say every minute and using the result
as a base for the own sequencenumber.

You don't lose a socket before you get the third handshake
packet and you can verify the sequencenumber using MD5 again.

I found this idea to be quite interesting when reading about it
the first time, and I currently don't see any negative side
effects from it.

The FreeBSD approach (just discarding the oldest socket in
SYN_RCVD state when the backlog gets too high) works often enough
aswell, but might cause problems if the flooder sends you more
SYNs than your backlog can handle in a shorter timeframe than
your SYN|ACK needs for it's way back to somebody who tries to
establish a normal connection and his answer back to you takes.

bye,
  Harold

-- 
<Shabby> Sleep is an abstinence syndrome wich occurs due to lack of caffein.
Wed Mar  4 04:53:33 CET 1998   #unix, ircnet


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