Re: ECN & cisco firewall

From: Ulrich Kiermayr (kie@thp.univie.ac.at)
Date: Fri Sep 08 2000 - 05:24:34 EST


On Fri, 8 Sep 2000, David S. Miller wrote:

> The authors of rfc793 probably, in all honesty, really meant
> "must be set to zero by current implementations".

Thats often the problem when interpretations are possible: Different
people see the meaning differently.

> Even though they did not say this, several pages later they bestow
> upon us the concept of being liberal in what one accepts. Perhaps
> Cisco PIX firewall engineers missed this paragraph. :-) Also, there
> is not one part of the packet parsing steps they describe which says
> "if any reserved flag bits are non-zero, drop packet" or "reset" (the
> sites which RST these ECN carrying packets are the ones which disturb
> me the most, in the Cisco PIX case does the firewall send a reset
> back?).

In case i havent sayed this clearly enough: It seems after several
tests: the PIX itself sent the RST (blocking the connection) instead of
letting the SYN pass to the actual host (behind the firewall)

> That's a really anal, zero purpose, check to put into a firewall.
> I don't know of even any embedded printer stacks that puke when
> the reserved flag bits are non-zero. The only things this protects
> anyone from are extensions such as ECN :-)

Yeah, but we will see what cisco has to say about that....

LL&P Ulrich

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System going down at 5 this afternoon to install scheduler bug.

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