ISS attacks (which we already fend off quite well).
1. First-cut implementation of RFC1948, Steve Bellovin's cryptographic
hash method of generating TCP ISS values. Note, this code is experimental
and disabled by default (experimental enough that I don't export the
variable via sysctl yet, either). There are a couple of issues I'd
like to discuss with Steve, so this code should only be used by people
who really know what they're doing.
2. Per a recent thread on Bugtraq, it's possible to determine a system's
uptime by snooping the RFC1323 TCP timestamp options sent by a host; in
4.4BSD, timestamps are created by incrementing the tcp_now variable
at 2 Hz; there's even a company out there that uses this to determine
web server uptime. According to Newsham's paper "The Problem With
Random Increments", while NetBSD's TCP ISS generation method is much
better than the "random increment" method used by FreeBSD and OpenBSD,
it is still theoretically possible to mount an attack against NetBSD's
method if the attacker knows how many times the tcp_iss_seq variable
has been incremented. By not leaking uptime information, we can make
that much harder to determine. So, we avoid the leak by giving each
TCP connection a timebase of 0.
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