Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-Window Attacks

TCP has historically been considered to be protected against spoofed off-path packet injection attacks by relying on the fact that it is difficult to guess the 4-tuple (the source and destination IP addresses and the source and destination ports) in combination with the 32-bit sequence number(s). A combination of increasing window sizes and applications using longer-term connections (e.g., H-323 or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [RFC4271]) have left modern TCP implementations more vulnerable to these types of spoofed packet injection attacks. Many of these long-term TCP applications tend to have predictable IP addresses and ports that makes it far easier for the 4-tuple (4-tuple is the same as the socket pair mentioned in RFC 793) to be guessed. Having guessed the 4-tuple correctly, an attacker can inject a TCP segment with the RST bit set, the SYN bit set or data into a TCP connection by systematically guessing the sequence number of the spoofed segment to be in the current receive window. This can cause the connection to abort or cause data corruption. This document specifies small modifications to the way TCP handles inbound segments that can reduce the chances of a successful attack.