[PATCH net 6/7] tcp: increase source port perturb table to 2^16

From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Wed Apr 27 2022 - 02:55:15 EST


Moshe Kol, Amit Klein, and Yossi Gilad reported being able to accurately
identify a client by forcing it to emit only 40 times more connections
than there are entries in the table_perturb[] table. The previous two
improvements consisting in resalting the secret every 10s and adding
randomness to each port selection only slightly improved the situation,
and the current value of 2^8 was too small as it's not very difficult
to make a client emit 10k connections in less than 10 seconds.

Thus we're increasing the perturb table from 2^8 to 2^16 so that the the
same precision now requires 2.6M connections, which is more difficult in
this time frame and harder to hide as a background activity. The impact
is that the table now uses 256 kB instead of 1 kB, which could mostly
affect devices making frequent outgoing connections. However such
components usually target a small set of destinations (load balancers,
database clients, perf assessment tools), and in practice only a few
entries will be visited, like before.

A live test at 1 million connections per second showed no performance
difference from the previous value.

Reported-by: Moshe Kol <moshe.kol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Yossi Gilad <yossi.gilad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reported-by: Amit Klein <aksecurity@xxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Willy Tarreau <w@xxxxxx>
---
net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c | 9 +++++----
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c b/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c
index d746e5656baf..f30c50aaf8e2 100644
--- a/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c
+++ b/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c
@@ -726,11 +726,12 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(inet_unhash);
* Note that we use 32bit integers (vs RFC 'short integers')
* because 2^16 is not a multiple of num_ephemeral and this
* property might be used by clever attacker.
- * RFC claims using TABLE_LENGTH=10 buckets gives an improvement,
- * we use 256 instead to really give more isolation and
- * privacy, this only consumes 1 KB of kernel memory.
+ * RFC claims using TABLE_LENGTH=10 buckets gives an improvement, though
+ * attacks were since demonstrated, thus we use 65536 instead to really
+ * give more isolation and privacy, at the expense of 256kB of kernel
+ * memory.
*/
-#define INET_TABLE_PERTURB_SHIFT 8
+#define INET_TABLE_PERTURB_SHIFT 16
#define INET_TABLE_PERTURB_SIZE (1 << INET_TABLE_PERTURB_SHIFT)
static u32 *table_perturb;

--
2.17.5