Introduction to Network Security

IP

As noted, IP is a ``network layer'' protocol. This is the layer that allows the hosts to actually ``talk'' to each other. Such things as carrying datagrams, mapping the Internet address (such as 10.2.3.4) to a physical network address (such as 08:00:69:0a:ca:8f), and routing, which takes care of making sure that all of the devices that have Internet connectivity can find the way to each other.

Understanding IP

IP has a number of very important features which make it an extremely robust and flexible protocol. For our purposes, though, we're going to focus on the security of IP, or more specifically, the lack thereof.

Attacks Against IP

A number of attacks against IP are possible. Typically, these exploit the fact that IP does not perform a robust mechanism for authentication , which is proving that a packet came from where it claims it did. A packet simply claims to originate from a given address, and there isn't a way to be sure that the host that sent the packet is telling the truth. This isn't necessarily a weakness, per se , but it is an important point, because it means that the facility of host authentication has to be provided at a higher layer on the ISO/OSI Reference Model. Today, applications that require strong host authentication (such as cryptographic applications) do this at the application layer.

IP Spoofing.

This is where one host claims to have the IP address of another. Since many systems (such as router access control lists) define which packets may and which packets may not pass based on the sender's IP address, this is a useful technique to an attacker: he can send packets to a host, perhaps causing it to take some sort of action.

Additionally, some applications allow login based on the IP address of the person making the request (such as the Berkeley r-commands )[2]. These are both good examples how trusting untrustable layers can provide security that is -- at best -- weak.

IP Session Hijacking.

This is a relatively sophisticated attack, first described by Steve Bellovin [3]. This is very dangerous, however, because there are now toolkits available in the underground community that allow otherwise unskilled bad-guy-wannabes to perpetrate this attack. IP Session Hijacking is an attack whereby a user's session is taken over, being in the control of the attacker. If the user was in the middle of email, the attacker is looking at the email, and then can execute any commands he wishes as the attacked user. The attacked user simply sees his session dropped, and may simply login again, perhaps not even noticing that the attacker is still logged in and doing things.

For the description of the attack, let's return to our large network of networks in Figure 4. In this attack, a user on host A is carrying on a session with host G. Perhaps this is a telnet session, where the user is reading his email, or using a Unix shell account from home. Somewhere in the network between A and G sits host H which is run by a naughty person. The naughty person on host H watches the traffic between A and G, and runs a tool which starts to impersonate A to G, and at the same time tells A to shut up, perhaps trying to convince it that G is no longer on the net (which might happen in the event of a crash, or major network outage). After a few seconds of this, if the attack is successful, naughty person has ``hijacked'' the session of our user. Anything that the user can do legitimately can now be done by the attacker, illegitimately. As far as G knows, nothing has happened.

This can be solved by replacing standard telnet-type applications with encrypted versions of the same thing. In this case, the attacker can still take over the session, but he'll see only ``gibberish'' because the session is encrypted. The attacker will not have the needed cryptographic key(s) to decrypt the data stream from G, and will, therefore, be unable to do anything with the session.

TCP

TCP is a transport-layer protocol. It needs to sit on top of a network-layer protocol, and was designed to ride atop IP. (Just as IP was designed to carry, among other things, TCP packets.) Because TCP and IP were designed together and wherever you have one, you typically have the other, the entire suite of Internet protocols are known collectively as ``TCP/IP.'' TCP itself has a number of important features that we'll cover briefly.

Guaranteed Packet Delivery

Probably the most important is guaranteed packet delivery. Host A sending packets to host B expects to get acknowledgments back for each packet. If B does not send an acknowledgment within a specified amount of time,A will resend the packet.

Applications on host B will expect a data stream from a TCP session to be complete, and in order. As noted, if a packet is missing, it will be resent by A, and if packets arrive out of order, B will arrange them in proper order before passing the data to the requesting application.

This is suited well toward a number of applications, such as a telnet session. A user wants to be sure every keystroke is received by the remote host, and that it gets every packet sent back, even if this means occasional slight delays in responsiveness while a lost packet is resent, or while out-of-order packets are rearranged.

It is not suited well toward other applications, such as streaming audio or video, however. In these, it doesn't really matter if a packet is lost (a lost packet in a stream of 100 won't be distinguishable) but it does matter if they arrive late (i.e., because of a host resending a packet presumed lost), since the data stream will be paused while the lost packet is being resent. Once the lost packet is received, it will be put in the proper slot in the data stream, and then passed up to the application.

UDP

UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a simple transport-layer protocol. It does not provide the same features as TCP, and is thus considered ``unreliable.'' Again, although this is unsuitable for some applications, it does have much more applicability in other applications than the more reliable and robust TCP.

Lower Overhead than TCP

One of the things that makes UDP nice is its simplicity. Because it doesn't need to keep track of the sequence of packets, whether they ever made it to their destination, etc., it has lower overhead than TCP. This is another reason why it's more suited to streaming-data applications: there's less screwing around that needs to be done with making sure all the packets are there, in the right order, and that sort of thing.