We've recently had a long discussion about the CVE-2005-0356 time stamp denial-of-service attack. It turned out that Linux is only vunerable to this problem when tcp_tw_recycle is enabled (which it is not by default).
In general these two options are not really usable in today's internet because they make the (often false) assumption that a single IP address has a single TCP time stamp / PAWS clock. This assumption breaks both NAT/masquerading and also opens Linux to denial of service attacks (see the CVE description) Due to these numerous problems I propose to remove this code for 2.6.26 Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Index: linux/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt =================================================================== --- linux.orig/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt +++ linux/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt @@ -354,3 +354,15 @@ Why: The support code for the old firmwa and slightly hurts runtime performance. Bugfixes for the old firmware are not provided by Broadcom anymore. Who: Michael Buesch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> + +--------------------------- + +What: Support for /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_tw_{reuse,recycle} = 1 +When: 2.6.26 +Why: Enabling either of those makes Linux TCP incompatible with masquerading and + also opens Linux to the CVE-2005-0356 denial of service attack. And these + optimizations are explicitely disallowed by some benchmarks. They also have + been disabled by default for more than ten years so they're unlikely to be used + much. Due to these fatal flaws it doesn't make sense to keep the code. +Who: Andi Kleen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> + -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html