There is a type of attack that a TCP peer can launch on a connection. This is for sure in Rack or BBR and probably even the default stack if it uses lists in sack processing. The idea of the attack is that the attacker is driving you to look at 100's of sack blocks that only update 1 byte. So for example if you have 1 - 10,000 bytes outstanding the attacker sends in something like:
ACK 0 SACK(1-512) SACK(1024 - 1536), SACK(2048-2536), SACK(4096 - 4608), SACK(8192-8704)
This first sack looks fine but then the attacker sends
ACK 0 SACK(1-512) SACK(1025 - 1537), SACK(2049-2537), SACK(4097 - 4609), SACK(8193-8705) ACK 0 SACK(1-512) SACK(1027 - 1539), SACK(2051-2539), SACK(4099 - 4611), SACK(8195-8707) ...
These blocks are making you hunt across your linked list and split things up so that you have an entry for every other byte. Has your list grows you spend more and more CPU running through the lists. The idea here is the attacker chooses entries as far apart as possible that make you run through the list. This example is small but in theory if the window is open to say 1Meg you could end up with 100's of thousands link list entries.
To combat this we introduce three things.
- when the peer requests a very small MSS we stop processing SACK's from them. This prevents a malicious peer from just using a small MSS to do the same thing.
- Any time we get a sack block, we use the sack-filter to remove sacks that are smaller than the smallest v4 mss (minus 40 for max TCP options) unless it ties up to snd_max (since that is legal). All other sacks in theory should be at least an MSS. If we get such an attacker that means we basically start skipping all but MSS sized Sacked blocks.
- The sack filter used to throw away data when its bounds were exceeded, instead now we increase its size to 15 and then throw away sack's if the filter gets over-run to prevent the malicious attacker from over-running the sack filter and thus we start to process things anyway.
The default stack will need to start using the sack-filter which we have talked about in past conference calls to take full advantage of the protections offered by it (and reduce cpu consumption when processing sacks).
After this set of changes is in rack can drop its SAD detection completely