Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) T. Kivinen
Request for Comments: 5879 AuthenTec, Inc.
Category: Informational D. McDonald
ISSN: 2070-1721 Oracle Corporation
May 2010
Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL Packets
Abstract
This document describes a set of heuristics for distinguishing IPsec
ESP-NULL (Encapsulating Security Payload without encryption) packets
from encrypted ESP packets. These heuristics can be used on
intermediate devices, like traffic analyzers, and deep-inspection
engines, to quickly decide whether or not a given packet flow is
encrypted, i.e., whether or not it can be inspected. Use of these
heuristics does not require any changes made on existing IPsec hosts
that are compliant with RFC 4303.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5879.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 1]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................3
1.1. Applicability: Heuristic Traffic Inspection and
Wrapped ESP ................................................4
1.2. Terminology ................................................4
2. Other Options ...................................................5
2.1. AH .........................................................5
2.2. Mandating by Policy ........................................6
2.3. Modifying ESP ..............................................6
3. Description of Heuristics .......................................6
4. IPsec Flows .....................................................7
5. Deep-Inspection Engine ..........................................9
6. Special and Error Cases .........................................9
7. UDP Encapsulation ..............................................10
8. Heuristic Checks ...............................................10
8.1. ESP-NULL Format ...........................................11
8.2. Self Describing Padding Check .............................12
8.3. Protocol Checks ...........................................14
8.3.1. TCP Checks .........................................15
8.3.2. UDP Checks .........................................16
8.3.3. ICMP Checks ........................................16
8.3.4. SCTP Checks ........................................17
8.3.5. IPv4 and IPv6 Tunnel Checks ........................17
9. Security Considerations ........................................17
10. References ....................................................18
10.1. Normative References .....................................18
10.2. Informative References ...................................18
Appendix A. Example Pseudocode ...................................20
A.1. Fastpath ..................................................20
A.2. Slowpath ..................................................23
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 2]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
1. Introduction
The ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload [RFC4303]) protocol can be
used with NULL encryption [RFC2410] to provide authentication,
integrity protection, and optionally replay detection, but without
confidentiality. ESP without encryption (referred to as ESP-NULL)
offers similar properties to IPsec's AH (Authentication Header
[RFC4302]). One reason to use ESP-NULL instead of AH is that AH
cannot be used if there are NAT (Network Address Translation) devices
on the path. With AH, it would be easy to detect packets that have
only authentication and integrity protection, as AH has its own
protocol number and deterministic packet length. With ESP-NULL, such
detection is nondeterministic, in spite of the base ESP packet format
being fixed.
In some cases, intermediate devices would like to detect ESP-NULL
packets so they could perform deep inspection or enforce access
control. This kind of deep inspection includes virus detection, spam
filtering, and intrusion detection. As end nodes might be able to
bypass those checks by using encrypted ESP instead of ESP-NULL, these
kinds of scenarios also require very specific policies to forbid such
circumvention.
These sorts of policy requirements usually mean that the whole
network needs to be controlled, i.e., under the same administrative
domain. Such setups are usually limited to inside the network of one
enterprise or organization, and encryption is not used as the network
is considered safe enough from eavesdroppers.
Because the traffic inspected is usually host-to-host traffic inside
one organization, that usually means transport mode IPsec is used.
Note, that most of the current uses of IPsec are not host-to-host
traffic inside one organization, but for the intended use cases for
the heuristics, this will most likely be the case. Also, the tunnel
mode case is much easier to solve than transport mode as it is much
easier to detect the IP header inside the ESP-NULL packet.
It should also be noted that even if new protocol modifications for
ESP support easier detection of ESP-NULL in the future, this document
will aid in the transition of older end-systems. That way, a
solution can be implemented immediately, and not after 5-10 years of
upgrade and deployment. Even with protocol modification for end
nodes, the intermediate devices will need heuristics until they can
assume that those protocol modifications can be found from all the
end devices. To make sure that any solution does not break in the
future, it would be best if such heuristics are documented -- i.e.,
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 3]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
publishing an RFC for what to do now, even though there might be a
new protocol coming in the future that will solve the same problem in
a better way.
1.1. Applicability: Heuristic Traffic Inspection and Wrapped ESP
There are two ways to enable intermediate security devices to
distinguish between encrypted and unencrypted ESP traffic:
o The heuristics approach has the intermediate node inspect the
unchanged ESP traffic, to determine with extremely high
probability whether or not the traffic stream is encrypted.
o The Wrapped ESP (WESP) approach [RFC5840], in contrast, requires
the ESP endpoints to be modified to support the new protocol.
WESP allows the intermediate node to distinguish encrypted and
unencrypted traffic deterministically, using a simpler
implementation for the intermediate node.
Both approaches are being documented simultaneously by the IPsecME
Working Group, with WESP being put on Standards Track while the
heuristics approach is being published as an Informational RFC.
While endpoints are being modified to adopt WESP, both approaches
will likely coexist for years, because the heuristic approach is
needed to inspect traffic where at least one of the endpoints has not
been modified. In other words, intermediate nodes are expected to
support both approaches in order to achieve good security and
performance during the transition period.
1.2. Terminology
This document uses following terminology:
Flow
A TCP/UDP or IPsec flow is a stream of packets that are part of
the same TCP/UDP or IPsec stream, i.e., TCP or UDP flow is a
stream of packets having same 5 tuple (source and destination IP
and port, and TCP/UDP protocol). Note, that this kind of flow is
also called microflow in some documents.
Flow Cache
deep-inspection engines and similar devices use a cache of flows
going through the device, and that cache keeps state of all flows
going through the device.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 4]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
IPsec Flow
An IPsec flow is a stream of packets sharing the same source IP,
destination IP, protocol (ESP/AH), and Security Parameter Index
(SPI). Strictly speaking, the source IP does not need to be a
part of the flow identification, but it can be. For this reason,
it is safer to assume that the source IP is always part of the
flow identification.
2. Other Options
This document will discuss the heuristic approach of detecting ESP-
NULL packets. There are some other options that can be used, and
this section will briefly discuss them.
2.1. AH
The most logical approach would use the already defined protocol that
offers authentication and integrity protection, but not
confidentiality, namely AH. AH traffic is clearly marked as not
encrypted, and can always be inspected by intermediate devices.
Using AH has two problems. First, as it also protects the IP
headers, it will also protect against NATs on the path; thus, it will
not work if there is a NAT on the path between end nodes. In some
environments this might not be a problem, but some environments,
include heavy use of NATs even inside the internal network of the
enterprise or organization. NAT-Traversal (NAT-T, [RFC3948]) could
be extended to support AH also, and the early versions of the NAT-T
proposals did include that, but it was left out as it was not seen as
necessary.
Another problem is that in the new IPsec Architecture [RFC4301] the
support for AH is now optional, meaning not all implementations
support it. ESP-NULL has been defined to be mandatory to implement
by "Cryptographic Algorithm Implementation Requirements for
Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) and Authentication Header (AH)"
[RFC4835].
AH also has quite complex processing rules compared to ESP when
calculating the Integrity Check Value (ICV), including things like
zeroing out mutable fields. Also, as AH is not as widely used as
ESP, the AH support is not as well tested in the interoperability
events.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 5]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
2.2. Mandating by Policy
Another easy way to solve this problem is to mandate the use of ESP-
NULL with common parameters within an entire organization. This
either removes the need for heuristics (if no ESP-encrypted traffic
is allowed at all) or simplifies them considerably (only one set of
parameters needs to be inspected, e.g., everybody in the organization
who is using ESP-NULL must use HMAC-SHA-1-96 as their integrity
algorithm). This does work unless one of a pair of communicating
machines is not under the same administrative domain as the deep-
inspection engine. (IPsec Security Associations (SAs) must be
satisfactory to all communicating parties, so only one communicating
peer needs to have a sufficiently narrow policy.) Also, such a
solution might require some kind of centralized policy management to
make sure everybody in an administrative domain uses the same policy,
and that changes to that single policy can be coordinated throughout
the administrative domain.
2.3. Modifying ESP
Several documents discuss ways of modifying ESP to offer intermediate
devices information about an ESP packet's use of NULL encryption.
The following methods have been discussed: adding an IP-option,
adding a new IP-protocol number plus an extra header [RFC5840],
adding new IP-protocol numbers that tell the ESP-NULL parameters
[AUTH-ONLY-ESP], reserving an SPI range for ESP-NULL [ESP-NULL], and
using UDP encapsulation with a different format and ports.
All of the aforementioned documents require modification to ESP,
which requires that all end nodes be modified before intermediate
devices can assume that this new ESP format is in use. Updating end
nodes will require a lot of time. An example of slow end-node
deployment is Internet Key Exchange Protocol version 2 (IKEv2).
Considering an implementation that requires both IKEv2 and a new ESP
format, it would take several years, possibly as long as a decade,
before widespread deployment.
3. Description of Heuristics
The heuristics to detect ESP-NULL packets will only require changes
to those intermediate devices that do deep inspection or other
operations that require the detection of ESP-NULL. As those nodes
require changes regardless of any ESP-NULL method, updating
intermediate nodes is unavoidable. Heuristics do not require updates
or modifications to any other devices on the rest of the network,
including (especially) end nodes.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 6]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
In this document, it is assumed that an affected intermediate node
will act as a stateful interception device, meaning it will keep
state of the IPsec flows -- where flows are defined by the ESP SPI
and IP addresses forming an IPsec SA -- going through it. The
heuristics can also be used without storing any state, but
performance will be worse in that case, as heuristic checks will need
to be done for each packet, not only once per flow. This will also
affect the reliability of the heuristics.
Generally, an intermediate node runs heuristics only for the first
few packets of the new flow (i.e., the new IPsec SA). After those
few packets, the node detects parameters of the IPsec flow, it skips
detection heuristics, and it can perform direct packet-inspecting
action based on its own policy. Once detected, ESP-NULL packets will
never be detected as encrypted ESP packets, meaning that valid ESP-
NULL packets will never bypass the deep inspection.
The only failure mode of these heuristics is to assume encrypted ESP
packets are ESP-NULL packets, thus causing completely random packet
data to be deeply inspected. An attacker can easily send random-
looking ESP-NULL packets that will cause heuristics to detect packets
as encrypted ESP, but that is no worse than sending non-ESP fuzz
through an intermediate node. The only way an ESP-NULL flow can be
mistaken for an encrypted ESP flow is if the ESP-NULL flow uses an
authentication algorithm of which the packet inspector has no
knowledge.
For hardware implementations, all the flow lookup based on the ESP
next header number (50), source address, destination address, and SPI
can be done by the hardware (there is usually already similar
functionality there, for TCP/UDP flows). The heuristics can be
implemented by the hardware, but using software will allow faster
updates when new protocol modifications come out or new protocols
need support.
As described in Section 7, UDP-encapsulated ESP traffic may also have
Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) applied to it, and so there
is already a 5-tuple state in the stateful inspection gateway.
4. IPsec Flows
ESP is a stateful protocol, meaning there is state stored in both end
nodes of the ESP IPsec SA, and the state is identified by the pair of
destination IP and SPI. Also, end nodes often fix the source IP
address in an SA unless the destination is a multicast group.
Typically, most (if not all) flows of interest to an intermediate
device are unicast, so it is safer to assume the receiving node also
uses a source address, and the intermediate device should therefore
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 7]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
do the same. In some cases, this might cause extraneous cached ESP
IPsec SA flows, but by using the source address, two distinct flows
will never be mixed. For sites that heavily use multicast, such
traffic is deterministically identifiable (224.0.0.0/4 for IPv4 and
ff00::0/8 for IPv6), and an implementation can save the space of
multiple cache entries for a multicast flow by checking the
destination address first.
When the intermediate device sees a new ESP IPsec flow, i.e., a new
flow of ESP packets where the source address, destination address,
and SPI number form a triplet that has not been cached, it will start
the heuristics to detect whether or not this flow is ESP-NULL. These
heuristics appear in Section 8.
When the heuristics finish, they will label the flow as either
encrypted (which tells that packets in this flow are encrypted, and
cannot be ESP-NULL packets) or as ESP-NULL. This information, along
with the ESP-NULL parameters detected by the heuristics, is stored to
a flow cache, which will be used in the future when processing
packets of the same flow.
Both encrypted ESP and ESP-NULL flows are processed based on the
local policy. In normal operation, encrypted ESP flows are passed
through or dropped per local policy, and ESP-NULL flows are passed to
the deep-inspection engine. Local policy will also be used to
determine other packet-processing parameters. Local policy issues
will be clearly marked in this document to ease implementation.
In some cases, the heuristics cannot determine the type of flow from
a single packet; and in that case, it might need multiple packets
before it can finish the process. In those cases, the heuristics
return "unsure" status. In that case, the packet processed based on
the local policy and flow cache is updated with "unsure" status.
Local policy for "unsure" packets could range from dropping (which
encourages end-node retransmission) to queuing (which may preserve
delivery, at the cost of artificially inflating round-trip times if
they are measured). When the next packet to the flow arrives, it is
heuristically processed again, and the cached flow may continue to be
"unsure", marked as ESP, or marked as an ESP-NULL flow.
There are several reasons why a single packet might not be enough to
detect the type of flow. One of them is that the next header number
was unknown, i.e., if heuristics do not know about the protocol for
the packet, they cannot verify it has properly detected ESP-NULL
parameters, even when the packet otherwise looks like ESP-NULL. If
the packet does not look like ESP-NULL at all, then the encrypted ESP
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 8]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
status can be returned quickly. As ESP-NULL heuristics need to know
the same protocols as a deep-inspection device, an ESP-NULL instance
of an unknown protocol can be handled the same way as a cleartext
instance of the same unknown protocol.
5. Deep-Inspection Engine
A deep-inspection engine running on an intermediate node usually
checks deeply into the packet and performs policy decisions based on
the contents of the packet. The deep-inspection engine should be
able to tell the difference between success, failure, and garbage.
Success means that a packet was successfully checked with the deep-
inspection engine, and it passed the checks and is allowed to be
forwarded. Failure means that a packet was successfully checked, but
the actual checks done indicated that packets should be dropped,
i.e., the packet contained a virus, was a known attack, or something
similar.
Garbage means that the packet's protocol headers or other portions
were unparseable. For the heuristics, it would be useful if the
deep-inspection engine could differentiate the garbage and failure
cases, as garbage cases can be used to detect certain error cases
(e.g., where the ESP-NULL parameters are incorrect, or the flow is
really an encrypted ESP flow, not an ESP-NULL flow).
If the deep-inspection engine only returns failure for all garbage
packets in addition to real failure cases, then a system implementing
the ESP-NULL heuristics cannot recover from error situations quickly.
6. Special and Error Cases
There is a small probability that an encrypted ESP packet (which
looks like it contains completely random bytes) will have plausible
bytes in expected locations, such that heuristics will detect the
packet as an ESP-NULL packet instead of detecting that it is
encrypted ESP packet. The actual probabilities will be computed
later in this document. Such a packet will not cause problems, as
the deep-inspection engine will most likely reject the packet and
return that it is garbage. If the deep-inspection engine is
rejecting a high number of packets as garbage, it might indicate an
original ESP-NULL detection for the flow was wrong (i.e., an
encrypted ESP flow was improperly detected as ESP-NULL). In that
case, the cached flow should be invalidated and discovery should
happen again.
Each ESP-NULL flow should also keep statistics about how many packets
have been detected as garbage by deep inspection, how many have
passed checks, or how many have failed checks with policy violations
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 9]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
(i.e., failed because of actual inspection policy failures, not
because the packet looked like garbage). If the number of garbage
packets suddenly increases (e.g., most of the packets start to look
like garbage according to the deep-inspection engine), it is possible
the old ESP-NULL SA was replaced by an encrypted ESP SA with an
identical SPI. If both ends use random SPI generation, this is a
very unlikely situation (1 in 2^32), but it is possible that some
nodes reuse SPI numbers (e.g., a 32-bit memory address of the SA
descriptor); thus, this situation needs to be handled.
Actual limits for cache invalidation are local policy decisions.
Sample invalidation policies include: 50% of packets marked as
garbage within a second, or if a deep-inspection engine cannot
differentiate between garbage and failure, failing more than 95% of
packets in last 10 seconds. For implementations that do not
distinguish between garbage and failure, failures should not be
treated too quickly as an indication of SA reuse. Often, single
packets cause state-related errors that block otherwise normal
packets from passing.
7. UDP Encapsulation
The flow lookup code needs to detect UDP packets to or from port 4500
in addition to the ESP packets, and perform similar processing to
them after skipping the UDP header. Port-translation by NAT often
rewrites what was originally 4500 into a different value, which means
each unique port pair constitutes a separate IPsec flow. That is,
UDP-encapsulated IPsec flows are identified by the source and
destination IP, source and destination port number, and SPI number.
As devices might be using IKEv2 Mobility and Multihoming (MOBIKE)
([RFC4555]), that also means that the flow cache should be shared
between the UDP encapsulated IPsec flows and non-encapsulated IPsec
flows. As previously mentioned, differentiating between garbage and
actual policy failures will help in proper detection immensely.
Because the checks are run for packets having just source port 4500
or packets having just destination port 4500, this might cause checks
to be run for non-ESP traffic too. Some traffic may randomly use
port 4500 for other reasons, especially if a port-translating NAT is
involved. The UDP encapsulation processing should also be aware of
that possibility.
8. Heuristic Checks
Normally, HMAC-SHA1-96 or HMAC-MD5-96 gives 1 out of 2^96 probability
that a random packet will pass the Hashed Message Authentication Code
(HMAC) test. This yields a 99.999999999999999999999999998%
probability that an end node will correctly detect a random packet as
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 10]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
being invalid. This means that it should be enough for an
intermediate device to check around 96 bits from the input packet.
By comparing them against known values for the packet, a deep-
inspection engine gains more or less the same probability as that
which an end node is using. This gives an upper limit of how many
bits heuristics need to check -- there is no point of checking much
more than that many bits (since that same probability is acceptable
for the end node). In most of the cases, the intermediate device
does not need probability that is that high, perhaps something around
32-64 bits is enough.
IPsec's ESP has a well-understood packet layout, but its variable-
length fields reduce the ability of pure algorithmic matching to one
requiring heuristics and assigning probabilities.
8.1. ESP-NULL Format
The ESP-NULL format is as follows:
0 1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Security Parameter Index (SPI) |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Sequence Number |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| IV (optional) |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Payload Data (variable) |
~ ~
| |
+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| | Padding (0-255 bytes) |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| | Pad Length | Next Header |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Integrity Check Value (variable) |
~ ~
| |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Figure 1
The output of the heuristics should provide information about whether
the packet is encrypted ESP or ESP-NULL. In case it is ESP-NULL, the
heuristics should also provide the Integrity Check Value (ICV) field
length and the Initialization Vector (IV) length.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 11]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
The currently defined ESP authentication algorithms have 4 different
lengths for the ICV field.
Different ICV lengths for different algorithm:
Algorithm ICV Length
------------------------------- ----------
AUTH_HMAC_MD5_96 96
AUTH_HMAC_SHA1_96 96
AUTH_AES_XCBC_96 96
AUTH_AES_CMAC_96 96
AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_256_128 128
AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_384_192 192
AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_512_256 256
Figure 2
In addition to the ESP authentication algorithms listed above, there
is also the encryption algorithm ENCR_NULL_AUTH_AES_GMAC, which does
not provide confidentiality but provides authentication, just like
ESP-NULL. This algorithm has an ICV Length of 128 bits, and it also
requires 8 bytes of IV.
In addition to the ICV length, there are also two possible values for
IV lengths: 0 bytes (default) and 8 bytes (for
ENCR_NULL_AUTH_AES_GMAC). Detecting the IV length requires
understanding the payload, i.e., the actual protocol data (meaning
TCP, UDP, etc.). This is required to distinguish the optional IV
from the actual protocol data. How well the IV can be distinguished
from the actual protocol data depends on how the IV is generated. If
the IV is generated using a method that generates random-looking data
(i.e., encrypted counter, etc.) then distinguishing protocol data
from the IV is quite easy. If an IV is a counter or similar non-
random value, then there are more possibilities for error. If the
protocol (also known as the, "next header") of the packet is one that
is not supported by the heuristics, then detecting the IV length is
impossible; thus, the heuristics cannot finish. In that case, the
heuristics return "unsure" and require further packets.
This document does not cover RSA authentication in ESP ([RFC4359]),
as it is considered beyond the scope of this document.
8.2. Self Describing Padding Check
Before obtaining the next header field, the ICV length must be
measured. Four different ICV lengths lead to four possible places
for the pad length and padding. Implementations must be careful when
trying larger sizes of the ICV such that the inspected bytes do not
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 12]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
belong to data that is not payload data. For example, a 10-byte ICMP
echo request will have zero-length padding, but any checks for
256-bit ICVs will inspect sequence number or SPI data if the packet
actually contains a 96-bit or 128-bit ICV.
ICV lengths should always be checked from shortest to longest. It is
much more likely to obtain valid-looking padding bytes in the
cleartext part of the payload than from the ICV field of a longer ICV
than what is currently inspected. For example, if a packet has a
96-bit ICV and the implementation starts checking for a 256-bit ICV
first, it is possible that the cleartext part of the payload contains
valid-looking bytes. If done in the other order, i.e., a packet
having a 256-bit ICV and the implementation checks for a 96-bit ICV
first, the inspected bytes are part of the longer ICV field, and
should be indistinguishable from random noise.
Each ESP packet always has between 0-255 bytes of padding, and
payload, pad length, and next header are always right aligned within
a 4-byte boundary. Normally, implementations use a minimal amount of
padding, but the heuristics method would be even more reliable if
some extra padding is added. The actual padding data has bytes
starting from 01 and ending at the pad length, i.e., exact padding
and pad length bytes for 4 bytes of padding would be 01 02 03 04 04.
Two cases of ESP-NULL padding are matched bytes (like the 04 04 shown
above), or the 0-byte padding case. In cases where there is one or
more bytes of padding, a node can perform a very simple and fast test
-- a sequence of N N in any of those four locations. Given four
2-byte locations (assuming the packet size allows all four possible
ICV lengths), the upper-bound probability of finding a random
encrypted packet that exhibits non-zero length ESP-NULL properties
is:
1 - (1 - 255 / 65536) ^ 4 == 0.015 == 1.5%
In the cases where there are 0 bytes of padding, a random encrypted
ESP packet has:
1 - (1 - 1 / 256) ^ 4 == 0.016 == 1.6%.
Together, both cases yield a 3.1% upper-bound chance of
misclassifying an encrypted packet as an ESP-NULL packet.
In the matched bytes case, further inspection (counting the pad bytes
backward and downward from the pad-length match) can reduce the
number of misclassified packets further. A padding length of 255
means a specific 256^254 sequence of bytes must occur. This
virtually eliminates pairs of 'FF FF' as viable ESP-NULL padding.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 13]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Every one of the 255 pairs for padding length N has only a 1 / 256^N
probability of being correct ESP-NULL padding. This shrinks the
aforementioned 1.5% of matched pairs to virtually nothing.
At this point, a maximum of 1.6% of possible byte values remain, so
the next header number is inspected. If the next header number is
known (and supported), then the packet can be inspected based on the
next header number. If the next header number is unknown (i.e., not
any of those with protocol checking support) the packet is marked
"unsure", because there is no way to detect the IV length without
inspecting the inner protocol payload.
There are six different next header fields that are in common use
(TCP (6), UDP (17), ICMP (1), Stream Control Transmission Protocol
(SCTP) (132), IPv4 (4), and IPv6 (41)), and if IPv6 is in heavy use,
that number increases to nine (Fragment (44), ICMPv6 (58), and IPv6
options (60)). To ensure that no packet is misinterpreted as an
encrypted ESP packet even when it is an ESP-NULL packet, a packet
cannot be marked as a failure even when the next header number is one
of those that is not known and supported. In those cases, the
packets are marked as "unsure".
An intermediate node's policy, however, can aid in detecting an ESP-
NULL flow even when the protocol is not a common-case one. By
counting how many "unsure" returns obtained via heuristics, and after
the receipt of a consistent, but unknown, next header number in same
location (i.e., likely with the same ICV length), the node can
conclude that the flow has high probability of being ESP-NULL (since
it is unlikely that so many packets would pass the integrity check at
the destination unless they are legitimate). The flow can be
classified as ESP-NULL with a known ICV length but an unknown IV
length.
Fortunately, in unknown protocol cases, the IV length does not
matter. If the protocol is unknown to the heuristics, it will most
likely be unknown by the deep-inspection engine also. It is
therefore important that heuristics should support at least those
same protocols as the deep-inspection engine. Upon receipt of any
inner next header number that is known by the heuristics (and deep-
inspection engine), the heuristics can detect the IV length properly.
8.3. Protocol Checks
Generic protocol checking is much easier with preexisting state. For
example, when many TCP/UDP flows are established over one IPsec SA, a
rekey produces a new SA that needs heuristics to detect its
parameters, and those heuristics benefit from the existing TCP/UDP
flows that were present in the previous IPsec SA. In that case, it
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 14]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
is just enough to check that if a new IPsec SA has packets belonging
to the flows of some other IPsec SA (previous IPsec SA before rekey),
and if those flows are already known by the deep-inspection engine,
it will give a strong indication that the new SA is really ESP-NULL.
The worst case scenario is when an end node starts up communication,
i.e., it does not have any previous flows through the device.
Heuristics will run on the first few packets received from the end
node. The later subsections mainly cover these start-up cases, as
they are the most difficult.
In the protocol checks, there are two different types of checks. The
first check is for packet validity, i.e., certain locations must
contain specific values. For example, an inner IPv4 header of an
IPv4 tunnel packet must have its 4-bit version number set to 4. If
it does not, the packet is not valid, and can be marked as a failure.
Other positions depending on ICV and IV lengths must also be checked,
and if all of them are failures, then the packet is a failure. If
any of the checks are "unsure", the packet is marked as such.
The second type of check is for variable, but easy-to-parse values.
For example, the 4-bit header length field of an inner IPv4 packet.
It has a fixed value (5) as long as there are no inner IPv4 options.
If the header-length has that specific value, the number of known
"good" bits increases. If it has some other value, the known "good"
bit count stays the same. A local policy might include reaching a
bit count that is over a threshold (for example, 96 bits), causing a
packet to be marked as valid.
8.3.1. TCP Checks
When the first TCP packet is fed to the heuristics, it is most likely
going to be the SYN packet of the new connection; thus, it will have
less useful information than other later packets might have. The
best valid packet checks include checking that header length and
flags have valid values and checking source and destination port
numbers, which in some cases can be used for heuristics (but in
general they cannot be reliably distinguished from random numbers
apart from some well-known ports like 25/80/110/143).
The most obvious field, TCP checksum, might not be usable, as it is
possible that the packet has already transited a NAT box that changed
the IP addresses but assumed any ESP payload was encrypted and did
not fix the transport checksums with the new IP addresses. Thus, the
IP numbers used in the checksum are wrong; thus, the checksum is
wrong. If the checksum is correct, it can again be used to increase
the valid bit count, but verifying checksums is a costly operation,
thus skipping that check might be best unless there is hardware to
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 15]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
help the calculation. Window size, urgent pointer, sequence number,
and acknowledgment numbers can be used, but there is not one specific
known value for them.
One good method of detection is that if a packet is dropped, then the
next packet will most likely be a retransmission of the previous
packet. Thus, if two packets are received with the same source and
destination port numbers, and where sequence numbers are either the
same or right after each other, then it's likely a TCP packet has
been correctly detected. This heuristic is most helpful when only
one packet is outstanding. For example, if a TCP SYN packet is lost
(or dropped because of policy), the next packet would always be a
retransmission of the same TCP SYN packet.
Existing deep-inspection engines usually do very good TCP flow
checking already, including flow tracking, verification of sequence
numbers, and reconstruction of the whole TCP flow. Similar methods
can be used here, but they are implementation dependent and not
described here.
8.3.2. UDP Checks
UDP header has even more problems than the TCP header, as UDP has
even less known data. The checksum has the same problem as the TCP
checksum, due to NATs. The UDP length field might not match the
overall packet length, as the sender is allowed to include TFC
(traffic flow confidentiality; see Section 2.7 of "IP Encapsulating
Security Payload" [RFC4303]) padding.
With UDP packets similar multiple packet methods can be used as with
TCP, as UDP protocols usually include several packets using same port
numbers going from one end node to another, thus receiving multiple
packets having a known pair of UDP port numbers is good indication
that the heuristics have passed.
Some UDP protocols also use identical source and destination port
numbers; thus, that is also a good check.
8.3.3. ICMP Checks
As ICMP messages are usually sent as return packets for other
packets, they are not very common packets to get as first packets for
the SA, the ICMP ECHO_REQUEST message being a noteworthy exception.
ICMP ECHO_REQUEST has a known type, code, identifier, and sequence
number. The checksum, however, might be incorrect again because of
NATs.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 16]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
For ICMP error messages, the ICMP message contains part of the
original IP packet inside. Then, the same rules that are used to
detect IPv4/IPv6 tunnel checks can be used.
8.3.4. SCTP Checks
SCTP [RFC4960] has a self-contained checksum, which is computed over
the SCTP payload and is not affected by NATs unless the NAT is SCTP-
aware. Even more than the TCP and UDP checksums, the SCTP checksum
is expensive, and may be prohibitive even for deep packet
inspections.
SCTP chunks can be inspected to see if their lengths are consistent
across the total length of the IP datagram, so long as TFC padding is
not present.
8.3.5. IPv4 and IPv6 Tunnel Checks
In cases of tunneled traffic, the packet inside contains a full IPv4
or IPv6 packet. Many fields are usable. For IPv4, those fields
include version, header length, total length (again TFC padding might
confuse things there), protocol number, and 16-bit header checksum.
In those cases, the intermediate device should give the decapsulated
IP packet to the deep-inspection engine. IPv6 has fewer usable
fields, but the version number, packet length (modulo TFC confusion),
and next header all can be used by deep packet inspection.
If all traffic going through the intermediate device is either from
or to certain address blocks (for example, either to or from the
company intranet prefix), this can also be checked by the heuristics.
9. Security Considerations
Attackers can always bypass ESP-NULL deep packet inspection by using
encrypted ESP (or some other encryption or tunneling method) instead,
unless the intermediate node's policy requires dropping of packets
that it cannot inspect. Ultimately, the responsibility for
performing deep inspection, or allowing intermediate nodes to perform
deep inspection, must rest on the end nodes. That is, if a server
allows encrypted connections also, then an attacker who wants to
attack the server and wants to bypass a deep-inspection device in the
middle, will use encrypted traffic. This means that the protection
of the whole network is only as good as the policy enforcement and
protection of the end node. One way to enforce deep inspection for
all traffic, is to forbid encrypted ESP completely, in which case
ESP-NULL detection is easier, as all packets must be ESP-NULL based
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 17]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
on the policy (heuristics may still be needed to find out the IV and
ICV lengths, unless further policy restrictions eliminate the
ambiguities).
Section 3 discusses failure modes of the heuristics. An attacker can
poison flows, tricking inspectors into ignoring legitimate ESP-NULL
flows, but that is no worse than injecting fuzz.
Forcing the use of ESP-NULL everywhere inside the enterprise, so that
accounting, logging, network monitoring, and intrusion detection all
work, increases the risk of sending confidential information where
eavesdroppers can see it.
10. References
10.1. Normative References
[RFC2410] Glenn, R. and S. Kent, "The NULL Encryption Algorithm
and Its Use With IPsec", RFC 2410, November 1998.
[RFC4301] Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the
Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005.
[RFC4302] Kent, S., "IP Authentication Header", RFC 4302,
December 2005.
[RFC4303] Kent, S., "IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)",
RFC 4303, December 2005.
10.2. Informative References
[AUTH-ONLY-ESP]
Hoffman, P. and D. McGrew, "An Authentication-only
Profile for ESP with an IP Protocol Identifier", Work
in Progress, August 2007.
[ESP-NULL] Bhatia, M., "Identifying ESP-NULL Packets", Work
in Progress, December 2008.
[RFC3948] Huttunen, A., Swander, B., Volpe, V., DiBurro, L., and
M. Stenberg, "UDP Encapsulation of IPsec ESP Packets",
RFC 3948, January 2005.
[RFC4359] Weis, B., "The Use of RSA/SHA-1 Signatures within
Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) and Authentication
Header (AH)", RFC 4359, January 2006.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 18]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
[RFC4555] Eronen, P., "IKEv2 Mobility and Multihoming Protocol
(MOBIKE)", RFC 4555, June 2006.
[RFC4835] Manral, V., "Cryptographic Algorithm Implementation
Requirements for Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)
and Authentication Header (AH)", RFC 4835, April 2007.
[RFC4960] Stewart, R., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
RFC 4960, September 2007.
[RFC5840] Grewal, K., Montenegro, G., and M. Bhatia, "Wrapped
Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) for Traffic
Visibility", RFC 5840, April 2010.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 19]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Appendix A. Example Pseudocode
This appendix is meant for the implementors. It does not include all
the required checks, and this is just example pseudocode, so final
implementation can be very different. It mostly lists things that
need to be done, but implementations can optimize steps depending on
their other parts. For example, implementation might combine
heuristics and deep inspection tightly together.
A.1. Fastpath
The following example pseudocode show the fastpath part of the packet
processing engine. This part is usually implemented in hardware.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This pseudocode uses following variables:
//
// SPI_offset: Number of bytes between start of protocol
// data and SPI. This is 0 for ESP and
// 8 for UDP-encapsulated ESP (i.e, skipping
// UDP header).
//
// IV_len: Length of the IV of the ESP-NULL packet.
//
// ICV_len: Length of the ICV of the ESP-NULL packet.
//
// State: State of the packet, i.e., ESP-NULL, ESP, or
// unsure.
//
// Also following data is taken from the packet:
//
// IP_total_len: Total IP packet length.
// IP_hdr_len: Header length of IP packet in bytes.
// IP_Src_IP: Source address of IP packet.
// IP_Dst_IP: Destination address of IP packet.
//
// UDP_len: Length of the UDP packet taken from UDP header.
// UDP_src_port: Source port of UDP packet.
// UDP_dst_port: Destination port of UDP packet.
//
// SPI: SPI number from ESP packet.
//
// Protocol: Actual protocol number of the protocol inside
// ESP-NULL packet.
// Protocol_off: Calculated offset to the protocol payload data
// inside ESP-NULL packet.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 20]
RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This is the main processing code for the packet
// This will check if the packet requires ESP processing,
//
Process packet:
* If IP protocol is ESP
* Set SPI_offset to 0 bytes
* Goto Process ESP
* If IP protocol is UDP
* Goto Process UDP
* If IP protocol is WESP
// For information about WESP processing, see WESP
// specification.
* Continue WESP processing
* Continue Non-ESP processing
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code is run for UDP packets, and it checks if the
// packet is UDP encapsulated UDP packet, or UDP
// encapsulated IKE packet, or keepalive packet.
//
Process UDP:
// Reassembly is not mandatory here, we could
// do reassembly also only after detecting the
// packet being UDP encapsulated ESP packet, but
// that would complicate the pseudocode here
// a lot, as then we would need to add code
// for checking whether or not the UDP header is in this
// packet.
// Reassembly is to simplify things
* If packet is fragment
* Do full reassembly before processing
* If UDP_src_port != 4500 and UDP_dst_port != 4500
* Continue Non-ESP processing
* Set SPI_offset to 8 bytes
* If UDP_len > 4 and first 4 bytes of UDP packet are 0x000000
* Continue Non-ESP processing (pass IKE-packet)
* If UDP_len > 4 and first 4 bytes of UDP packet are 0x000002
* Continue WESP processing
* If UDP_len == 1 and first byte is 0xff
* Continue Non-ESP processing (pass NAT-Keepalive Packet)
* Goto Process ESP
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 21]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code is run for ESP packets (or UDP-encapsulated ESP
// packets). This checks if IPsec flow is known, and
// if not calls heuristics. If the IPsec flow is known
// then it continues processing based on the policy.
//
Process ESP:
* If packet is fragment
* Do full reassembly before processing
* If IP_total_len < IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset + 4
// If this packet was UDP encapsulated ESP packet then
// this might be valid UDP packet that might
// be passed or dropped depending on policy.
* Continue normal packet processing
* Load SPI from IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset
* Initialize State to ESP
// In case this was UDP encapsulated ESP, use UDP_src_port and
// UDP_dst_port also when finding data from SPI cache.
* Find IP_Src_IP + IP_Dst_IP + SPI from SPI cache
* If SPI found
* Load State, IV_len, ICV_len from cache
* If SPI not found or State is unsure
* Call Autodetect ESP parameters (drop to slowpath)
* If State is ESP
* Continue Non-ESP-NULL processing
* Goto Check ESP-NULL packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code is run for ESP-NULL packets, and this
// finds out the data required for deep-inspection
// engine (protocol number, and offset to data)
// and calls the deep-inspection engine.
//
Check ESP-NULL packet:
* If IP_total_len < IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset + IV_len + ICV_len
+ 4 (spi) + 4 (seq no) + 4 (protocol + padding)
// This packet was detected earlier as being part of
// ESP-NULL flow, so this means that either ESP-NULL
// was replaced with other flow or this is an invalid packet.
// Either drop or pass the packet, or restart
// heuristics based on the policy
* Continue packet processing
* Load Protocol from IP_total_len - ICV_len - 1
* Set Protocol_off to
IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset + IV_len + 4 (spi) + 4 (seq no)
* Do normal deep inspection on packet.
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 22]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Figure 3
A.2. Slowpath
The following example pseudocode shows the actual heuristics part of
the packet processing engine. This part is usually implemented in
software.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This pseudocode uses following variables:
//
// SPI_offset, IV_len, ICV_len, State, SPI,
// IP_total_len, IP_hdr_len, IP_Src_IP, IP_Dst_IP
// as defined in fastpath pseudocode.
//
// Stored_Check_Bits:Number of bits we have successfully
// checked to contain acceptable values
// in the actual payload data. This value
// is stored/retrieved from SPI cache.
//
// Check_Bits: Number of bits we have successfully
// checked to contain acceptable values
// in the actual payload data. This value
// is updated during the packet
// verification.
//
// Last_Packet_Data: Contains selected pieces from the
// last packet. This is used to compare
// certain fields of this packet to
// same fields in previous packet.
//
// Packet_Data: Selected pieces of this packet, same
// fields as Last_Packet_Data, and this
// is stored as new Last_Packet_Data to
// SPI cache after this packet is processed.
//
// Test_ICV_len: Temporary ICV length used during tests.
// This is stored to ICV_len when
// padding checks for the packet succeed
// and the packet didn't yet have unsure
// status.
//
// Test_IV_len: Temporary IV length used during tests.
//
// Pad_len: Padding length from the ESP packet.
//
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 23]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
// Protocol: Protocol number of the packet inside ESP
// packet.
//
// TCP.*: Fields from TCP header (from inside ESP)
// UDP.*: Fields from UDP header (from inside ESP)
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code starts the actual heuristics.
// During this the fastpath has already loaded
// State, ICV_len, and IV_len in case they were
// found from the SPI cache (i.e., in case the flow
// had unsure status).
//
Autodetect ESP parameters:
// First, we check if this is unsure flow, and
// if so, we check next packet against the
// already set IV/ICV_len combination.
* If State is unsure
* Call Verify next packet
* If State is ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
* If State is unsure
* Goto Verify unsure
// If we failed the test, i.e., State
// was changed to ESP, we check other
// ICV/IV_len values, i.e., fall through
// ICV lengths are tested in order of ICV lengths,
// from shortest to longest.
* Call Try standard algorithms
* If State is ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
* Call Try 128bit algorithms
* If State is ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
* Call Try 192bit algorithms
* If State is ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
* Call Try 256bit algorithms
* If State is ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
// AUTH_DES_MAC and AUTH_KPDK_MD5 are left out from
// this document.
// If any of those test above set state to unsure
// we mark IPsec flow as unsure.
* If State is unsure
* Goto Store unsure SPI cache info
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 24]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
// All of the test failed, meaning the packet cannot
// be ESP-NULL packet, thus we mark IPsec flow as ESP
* Goto Store ESP SPI cache info
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Store ESP-NULL status to the IPsec flow cache.
//
Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info:
* Store State, IV_len, ICV_len to SPI cache
using IP_Src_IP + IP_Dst_IP + SPI as key
* Continue Check ESP-NULL packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Store encrypted ESP status to the IPsec flow cache.
//
Store ESP SPI cache info:
* Store State, IV_len, ICV_len to SPI cache
using IP_Src_IP + IP_Dst_IP + SPI as key
* Continue Check non-ESP-NULL packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Store unsure flow status to IPsec flow cache.
// Here we also store the Check_Bits.
//
Store unsure SPI cache info:
* Store State, IV_len, ICV_len,
Stored_Check_Bits to SPI cache
using IP_Src_IP + IP_Dst_IP + SPI as key
* Continue Check unknown packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Verify this packet against the previously selected
// ICV_len and IV_len values. This will either
// fail (and set state to ESP to mark we do not yet
// know what type of flow this is) or will
// increment Check_Bits.
//
Verify next packet:
// We already have IV_len, ICV_len, and State loaded
* Load Stored_Check_Bits, Last_Packet_Data from SPI Cache
* Set Test_ICV_len to ICV_len, Test_IV_len to IV_len
* Initialize Check_Bits to 0
* Call Verify padding
* If verify padding returned Failure
// Initial guess was wrong, restart
* Set State to ESP
* Clear IV_len, ICV_len, State,
Stored_Check_Bits, Last_Packet_Data
from SPI Cache
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 25]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
* Return
// Ok, padding check succeeded again
* Call Verify packet
* If verify packet returned Failure
// Guess was wrong, restart
* Set State to ESP
* Clear IV_len, ICV_len, State,
Stored_Check_Bits, Last_Packet_Data
from SPI Cache
* Return
// It succeeded and updated Check_Bits and Last_Packet_Data store
// them to SPI cache.
* Increment Stored_Check_Bits by Check_Bits
* Store Stored_Check_Bits to SPI Cache
* Store Packet_Data as Last_Packet_Data to SPI cache
* Return
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This will check if we have already seen enough bits
// acceptable from the payload data, so we can decide
// that this IPsec flow is ESP-NULL flow.
//
Verify unsure:
// Check if we have enough check bits.
* If Stored_Check_Bits > configured limit
// We have checked enough bits, return ESP-NULL
* Set State ESP-NULL
* Goto Store ESP-NULL SPI cache info
// Not yet enough bits, continue
* Continue Check unknown packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Check for standard 96-bit algorithms.
//
Try standard algorithms:
// AUTH_HMAC_MD5_96, AUTH_HMAC_SHA1_96, AUTH_AES_XCBC_96,
// AUTH_AES_CMAC_96
* Set Test_ICV_len to 12, Test_IV_len to 0
* Goto Check packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Check for 128-bit algorithms, this is only one that
// can have IV, so we need to check different IV_len values
// here too.
//
Try 128bit algorithms:
// AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_256_128, ENCR_NULL_AUTH_AES_GMAC
* Set Test_ICV_len to 16, Test_IV_len to 0
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 26]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
* If IP_total_len < IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset
+ Test_IV_len + Test_ICV_len
+ 4 (spi) + 4 (seq no) + 4 (protocol + padding)
* Return
* Call Verify padding
* If verify padding returned Failure
* Return
* Initialize Check_Bits to 0
* Call Verify packet
* If verify packet returned Failure
* Goto Try GMAC
// Ok, packet seemed ok, but go now and check if we have enough
// data bits so we can assume it is ESP-NULL
* Goto Check if done for unsure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Check for GMAC MACs, i.e., MACs that have an 8-byte IV.
//
Try GMAC:
// ENCR_NULL_AUTH_AES_GMAC
* Set Test_IV_len to 8
* If IP_total_len < IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset
+ Test_IV_len + Test_ICV_len
+ 4 (spi) + 4 (seq no) + 4 (protocol + padding)
* Return
* Initialize Check_Bits to 0
* Call Verify packet
* If verify packet returned Failure
// Guess was wrong, continue
* Return
// Ok, packet seemed ok, but go now and check if we have enough
// data bits so we can assume it is ESP-NULL
* Goto Check if done for unsure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Check for 192-bit algorithms.
//
Try 192bit algorithms:
// AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_384_192
* Set Test_ICV_len to 24, Test_IV_len to 0
* Goto Check packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Check for 256-bit algorithms.
//
Try 256bit algorithms:
// AUTH_HMAC_SHA2_512_256
* Set Test_ICV_len to 32, Test_IV_len to 0
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 27]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
* Goto Check packet
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This actually does the checking for the packet, by
// first verifying the length, and then self describing
// padding, and if that succeeds, then checks the actual
// payload content.
//
Check packet:
* If IP_total_len < IP_hdr_len + SPI_offset
+ Test_IV_len + Test_ICV_len
+ 4 (spi) + 4 (seq no) + 4 (protocol + padding)
* Return
* Call Verify padding
* If verify padding returned Failure
* Return
* Initialize Check_Bits to 0
* Call Verify packet
* If verify packet returned Failure
// Guess was wrong, continue
* Return
// Ok, packet seemed ok, but go now and check if we have enough
// data bits so we can assume it is ESP-NULL
* Goto Check if done for unsure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This code checks if we have seen enough acceptable
// values in the payload data, so we can decide that this
// IPsec flow is ESP-NULL flow.
//
Check if done for unsure:
* If Stored_Check_Bits > configured limit
// We have checked enough bits, return ESP-NULL
* Set State ESP-NULL
* Set IV_len to Test_IV_len, ICV_len to Test_ICV_len
* Clear Stored_Check_Bits, Last_Packet_Data from SPI Cache
* Return
// Not yet enough bits, check if this is first unsure, if so
// store information. In case there are multiple
// tests succeeding, we always assume the first one
// (the one using shortest MAC) is the one we want to
// check in the future.
* If State is not unsure
* Set State unsure
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 28]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
// These values will be stored to SPI cache if
// the final state will be unsure
* Set IV_len to Test_IV_len, ICV_len to Test_ICV_len
* Set Stored_Check_Bits as Check_Bits
* Return
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Verify self describing padding
//
Verify padding:
* Load Pad_len from IP_total_len - Test_ICV_len - 2
* Verify padding bytes at
IP_total_len - Test_ICV_len - 1 - Pad_len ..
IP_total_len - Test_ICV_len - 2 are
1, 2, ..., Pad_len
* If Verify of padding bytes succeeded
* Return Success
* Return Failure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// This will verify the actual protocol content inside ESP
// packet.
//
Verify packet:
// We need to first check things that cannot be set, i.e., if any of
// those are incorrect, then we return Failure. For any
/ fields that might be correct, we increment the Check_Bits
// for a suitable amount of bits. If all checks pass, then
// we just return Success, and the upper layer will then
// later check if we have enough bits checked already.
* Load Protocol From IP_total_len - Test_ICV_len - 1
* If Protocol TCP
* Goto Verify TCP
* If Protocol UDP
* Goto Verify UDP
// Other protocols can be added here as needed, most likely same
// protocols as deep inspection does.
// Tunnel mode checks (protocol 4 for IPv4 and protocol 41 for
// IPv6) is also left out from here to make the document shorter.
* Return Failure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Verify TCP protocol headers
//
Verify TCP:
// First we check things that must be set correctly.
* If TCP.Data_Offset field < 5
// TCP head length too small
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 29]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
* Return Failure
// After that, we start to check things that do not
// have one definitive value, but can have multiple possible
// valid values.
* If TCP.ACK bit is not set, then check
that TCP.Acknowledgment_number field contains 0
// If the ACK bit is not set, then the acknowledgment
// field usually contains 0, but I do not think
// RFCs mandate it being zero, so we cannot make
// this a failure if it is not so.
* Increment Check_Bits by 32
* If TCP.URG bit is not set, then check
that TCP.Urgent_Pointer field contains 0
// If the URG bit is not set, then urgent pointer
// field usually contains 0, but I do not think
// RFCs mandate it being zero, so we cannot make
// this failure if it is not so.
* Increment Check_Bits by 16
* If TCP.Data_Offset field == 5
* Increment Check_Bits by 4
* If TCP.Data_Offset field > 5
* If TCP options format is valid and it is padded correctly
* Increment Check_Bits accordingly
* If TCP options format was garbage
* Return Failure
* If TCP.checksum is correct
// This might be wrong because packet passed NAT, so
// we cannot make this failure case.
* Increment Check_Bits by 16
// We can also do normal deeper TCP inspection here, i.e.,
// check that the SYN/ACK/FIN/RST bits are correct and state
// matches the state of existing flow if this is packet
// to existing flow, etc.
// If there is anything clearly wrong in the packet (i.e.,
// some data is set to something that it cannot be), then
// this can return Failure; otherwise, it should just
// increment Check_Bits matching the number of bits checked.
//
// We can also check things here compared to the last packet
* If Last_Packet_Data.TCP.source port =
Packet_Data.TCP.source_port and
Last_Packet_Data.TCP.destination port =
Packet_Data.TCP.destination port
* Increment Check_Bits by 32
* If Last_Packet_Data.TCP.Acknowledgement_number =
Packet_Data.TCP.Acknowledgement_number
* Increment Check_Bits by 32
* If Last_Packet_Data.TCP.sequence_number =
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 30]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Packet_Data.TCP.sequence_number
* Increment Check_Bits by 32
// We can do other similar checks here
* Return Success
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Verify UDP protocol headers
//
Verify UDP:
// First we check things that must be set correctly.
* If UDP.UDP_length > IP_total_len - IP_hdr_len - SPI_offset
- Test_IV_len - Test_ICV_len - 4 (spi)
- 4 (seq no) - 1 (protocol)
- Pad_len - 1 (Pad_len)
* Return Failure
* If UDP.UDP_length < 8
* Return Failure
// After that, we start to check things that do not
// have one definitive value, but can have multiple possible
// valid values.
* If UDP.UDP_checksum is correct
// This might be wrong because packet passed NAT, so
// we cannot make this failure case.
* Increment Check_Bits by 16
* If UDP.UDP_length = IP_total_len - IP_hdr_len - SPI_offset
- Test_IV_len - Test_ICV_len - 4 (spi)
- 4 (seq no) - 1 (protocol)
- Pad_len - 1 (Pad_len)
// If there is no TFC padding then UDP_length
// will be matching the full packet length
* Increment Check_Bits by 16
// We can also do normal deeper UDP inspection here.
// If there is anything clearly wrong in the packet (i.e.,
// some data is set to something that it cannot be), then
// this can return Failure; otherwise, it should just
// increment Check_Bits matching the number of bits checked.
//
// We can also check things here compared to the last packet
* If Last_Packet_Data.UDP.source_port =
Packet_Data.UDP.source_port and
Last_Packet_Data.destination_port =
Packet_Data.UDP.destination_port
* Increment Check_Bits by 32
* Return Success
Figure 4
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 31]RFC 5879 Heuristics for Detecting ESP-NULL May 2010
Authors' Addresses
Tero Kivinen
AuthenTec, Inc.
Fredrikinkatu 47
Helsinki FIN-00100
FI
EMail: kivinen@iki.fi
Daniel L. McDonald
Oracle Corporation
35 Network Drive
MS UBUR02-212
Burlington, MA 01803
USA
EMail: danmcd@opensolaris.org
Kivinen & McDonald Informational [Page 32]
