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Commit b77ab018 authored by Matt Caswell's avatar Matt Caswell
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Fix DTLS replay protection



The DTLS implementation provides some protection against replay attacks
in accordance with RFC6347 section 4.1.2.6.

A sliding "window" of valid record sequence numbers is maintained with
the "right" hand edge of the window set to the highest sequence number we
have received so far. Records that arrive that are off the "left" hand
edge of the window are rejected. Records within the window are checked
against a list of records received so far. If we already received it then
we also reject the new record.

If we have not already received the record, or the sequence number is off
the right hand edge of the window then we verify the MAC of the record.
If MAC verification fails then we discard the record. Otherwise we mark
the record as received. If the sequence number was off the right hand edge
of the window, then we slide the window along so that the right hand edge
is in line with the newly received sequence number.

Records may arrive for future epochs, i.e. a record from after a CCS being
sent, can arrive before the CCS does if the packets get re-ordered. As we
have not yet received the CCS we are not yet in a position to decrypt or
validate the MAC of those records. OpenSSL places those records on an
unprocessed records queue. It additionally updates the window immediately,
even though we have not yet verified the MAC. This will only occur if
currently in a handshake/renegotiation.

This could be exploited by an attacker by sending a record for the next
epoch (which does not have to decrypt or have a valid MAC), with a very
large sequence number. This means the right hand edge of the window is
moved very far to the right, and all subsequent legitimate packets are
dropped causing a denial of service.

A similar effect can be achieved during the initial handshake. In this
case there is no MAC key negotiated yet. Therefore an attacker can send a
message for the current epoch with a very large sequence number. The code
will process the record as normal. If the hanshake message sequence number
(as opposed to the record sequence number that we have been talking about
so far) is in the future then the injected message is bufferred to be
handled later, but the window is still updated. Therefore all subsequent
legitimate handshake records are dropped. This aspect is not considered a
security issue because there are many ways for an attacker to disrupt the
initial handshake and prevent it from completing successfully (e.g.
injection of a handshake message will cause the Finished MAC to fail and
the handshake to be aborted). This issue comes about as a result of trying
to do replay protection, but having no integrity mechanism in place yet.
Does it even make sense to have replay protection in epoch 0? That
issue isn't addressed here though.

This addressed an OCAP Audit issue.

CVE-2016-2181

Reviewed-by: default avatarRichard Levitte <levitte@openssl.org>
parent fa755697
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