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    RE: Separate SA for each TCP connection



    Hello,
    
    A couple of comments below.
    
    Best Regards,
    Joseph D. Harwood
    (408) 838-9434
    jharwood@vesta-corp.com
    www.vesta-corp.com
    
    
    > -----Original Message-----
    > From: owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu [mailto:owner-ips@ece.cmu.edu]On Behalf Of
    > Ernest Dainow
    > Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 7:53 AM
    > To: 'Bernard Aboba'
    > Cc: 'ips@ece.cmu.edu'
    > Subject: Separate SA for each TCP connection
    >
    >
    >
    > I think that the requirement that every TCP connection must have
    > its own SA
    > (Security Association) has a number of problems.
    >
    > First of all, it is difficult to enforce on the receiving side, if the
    > sending end does not comply with this requirement and uses an existing SA
    > for a second TCP connection. When IPSec receives a packet with a
    > valid SPI,
    > it cannot discover that the packet was sent on a different port
    > number than
    > the SA was set up for until after the security processing.
    >
    > To meet this requirement, extra checking must be done to compare every
    > packet to the SPD (Security Policy Database) after security processing. If
    > this is done, then various interoperability problems may occur when
    > communicating with an end device that is using standard IPSec.
    
    This checking on inbound traffic is a required part of IPsec (RFC2401,
    Section 5.2.1).
    
    >
    > The SPD is configured with Source IP:Port, Destination IP:Port. When an
    > administrator configures this, the source port is not known and so a wild
    > card is usually used. In standard IPSec implementations, this means that
    > multiple connections to the same destination address:port will travel down
    > the same SA.
    >
    > Interoperability between standard IPSec and IPS IPSec may be needed in a
    > number of situations:
    > 1. Using tunnel mode to connect to a storage device behind a gateway, such
    > as a firewall (which terminates the IPSec connection).
    > 2. Connections to an iSNS or SLP server which likely will be
    > implemented on
    > an industry standard OS that uses standard IPSec.
    > 3. If the IP/IPSec stack on the IPS device is used as a TCP offload engine
    > for traffic other than storage. Common uses might be for
    > management such as
    > telnet.
    >
    > The only reason for this requirement that I could find is in Section 5.8.3
    > of draft-ietf-ips-security-09.txt.
    >
    > "IPsec implementations that only support machine authentication typically
    > have no way to distinguish between user traffic within the kernel. As a
    > result, where machine authentication is used, once an Ipsec SA is opened,
    > another user on a multi-user machine may be able to send traffic down the
    > IPsec SA. To limit the potential vulnerability, iSCSI, iFCP or
    > FCIP security
    > implementations MUST negotiate a separate IPsec Phase 2 SA for each
    > connection, with descriptors specific to that connection."
    
    How does requiring each connection to have its own Phase 2 SA mitigate the
    vulnerability in this scenario?
    
    >
    > This is a general feature/limitation of IPSec. IPSec by
    > definition operates
    > at the network layer. If application layer authentication is desired, it
    > should be done by the application. iSCSI has the option to use
    > SRP or other
    > authentication methods. Proposals have been made for FCIP to provide an
    > option for user authentication based on SRP, consistent with iSCSI, but
    > current direction has been to favor a Fibre Channel based authentication
    > scheme (yet to be defined).
    >
    > The potential interoperability problems resulting from the requirement to
    > have a separate SA for each TCP connection is not worth the attempt to
    > "limit" this vulnerability, when other clean ways exist to establish user
    > authentication.
    >
    > Ernie Dainow
    >
    
    


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Last updated: Tue Feb 19 04:18:20 2002
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