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tcp: mitigate a side channel for detection of TCP connections

Description

tcp: mitigate a side channel for detection of TCP connections

If a blind attacker wants to guess by sending ACK segments if there
exists a TCP connection , this might trigger a challenge ACK on an
existing TCP connection. To make this hit non-observable for the
attacker, also increment the global counter, which would have been
incremented if it would have been a non-hit.
This issue was reported as issue number 11 in Keyu Man et al.:
SCAD: Towards a Universal and Automated Network Side-Channel

Vulnerability Detection

Reviewed by: Nick Banks, Peter Lei
MFC after: 1 week
Sponsored by: Netflix, Inc.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D51724

Details

Provenance
tuexenAuthored on Aug 9 2025, 12:17 PM
Reviewer
nick
Differential Revision
D51724: tcp: mitigate a side channel for detection of TCP connections
Parents
rG2eb786d96e97: tcp: rate limit the sending of all RST segments
Branches
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Tags
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