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Date:      Thu, 12 Apr 2001 10:53:11 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com>
To:        Rob Simmons <rsimmons@wlcg.com>
Cc:        Mark T Roberts <newsletter@marktroberts.com>, <freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: non-random IP IDs
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.31.0104121046150.3325-100000@achilles.silby.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.33.0104120910370.63358-100000@mail.wlcg.com>

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On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Rob Simmons wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Mike Silbersack wrote:
>
> > Each IP packet sent has with it a 16-bit ID.  The numbers must remain
> > unique over a short period of time so fragmentation can work properly.  As
> > such, everything except recent openbsds simple increments the id by 1 for
> > each packet sent out.
>
> What is the behavior of OpenBSD for this?  If its not important, why would
> they change it?

They generate pseudo-random, nonrepeating ids.  For the actual algorithm,
see:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/ip_id.c?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=openbsd

Although it's nice in theory, the amount of work required to generate the
ids seems too great to justify for each packet sent.  (Note that I said
"seems", I'm not sure if anyone has done actual benchmarks to determine
the actual impact.)

Mike "Silby" Silbersack


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