Internet DRAFT - draft-ietf-ipsecme-ddos-protection
draft-ietf-ipsecme-ddos-protection
IPSecME Working Group Y. Nir
Internet-Draft Check Point
Intended status: Standards Track V. Smyslov
Expires: October 17, 2016 ELVIS-PLUS
April 15, 2016
Protecting Internet Key Exchange Protocol version 2 (IKEv2)
Implementations from Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
draft-ietf-ipsecme-ddos-protection-06
Abstract
This document recommends implementation and configuration best
practices for Internet Key Exchange Protocol version 2 (IKEv2)
Responders, to allow them to resist Denial of Service and Distributed
Denial of Service attacks. Additionally, the document introduces a
new mechanism called "Client Puzzles" that help accomplish this task.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on October 17, 2016.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Conventions Used in This Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. The Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Defense Measures while IKE SA is being created . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Retention Periods for Half-Open SAs . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2. Rate Limiting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3. The Stateless Cookie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.4. Puzzles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.5. Session Resumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.6. Keeping computed Shared Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.7. Preventing Attacks using "Hash and URL" Certificate
Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.8. IKE Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Defense Measures after IKE SA is created . . . . . . . . . . 11
6. Plan for Defending a Responder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7. Using Puzzles in the Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.1. Puzzles in IKE_SA_INIT Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7.1.1. Presenting Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
7.1.2. Solving Puzzle and Returning the Solution . . . . . . 18
7.1.3. Computing Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
7.1.4. Analyzing Repeated Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
7.1.5. Making Decision whether to Serve the Request . . . . 20
7.2. Puzzles in IKE_AUTH Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7.2.1. Presenting Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
7.2.2. Solving Puzzle and Returning the Solution . . . . . . 23
7.2.3. Computing Puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.2.4. Receiving Puzzle Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8. Payload Formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8.1. PUZZLE Notification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8.2. Puzzle Solution Payload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
9. Operational Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
11. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
12. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
13. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
13.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
13.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
1. Introduction
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks have always been considered a serious
threat. These attacks are usually difficult to defend against since
the amount of resources the victim has is always bounded (regardless
of how high it is) and because some resources are required for
distinguishing a legitimate session from an attack.
The Internet Key Exchange protocol version 2 (IKEv2) described in
[RFC7296] includes defense against DoS attacks. In particular, there
is a cookie mechanism that allows the IKE Responder to effectively
defend itself against DoS attacks from spoofed IP-addresses.
However, bot-nets have become widespread, allowing attackers to
perform Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which are more
difficult to defend against. This document presents recommendations
to help the Responder thwart (D)DoS attacks. It also introduces a
new mechanism -- "puzzles" -- that can help accomplish this task.
2. Conventions Used in This Document
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
3. The Vulnerability
The IKE_SA_INIT Exchange described in Section 1.2 of [RFC7296]
involves the Initiator sending a single message. The Responder
replies with a single message and also allocates memory for a
structure called a half-open IKE Security Association (SA). This
half-open SA is later authenticated in the IKE_AUTH Exchange. If
that IKE_AUTH request never comes, the half-open SA is kept for an
unspecified amount of time. Depending on the algorithms used and
implementation, such a half-open SA will use from around 100 bytes to
several thousands bytes of memory.
This creates an easy attack vector against an IKE Responder.
Generating the IKE_SA_INIT request is cheap, and sending multiple
such requests can either cause the Responder to allocate too much
resources and fail, or else if resource allocation is somehow
throttled, legitimate Initiators would also be prevented from setting
up IKE SAs.
An obvious defense, which is described in Section 4.2, is limiting
the number of half-open SAs opened by a single peer. However, since
all that is required is a single packet, an attacker can use multiple
spoofed source IP addresses.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
If we break down what a Responder has to do during an initial
exchange, there are three stages:
1. When the IKE_SA_INIT request arrives, the Responder:
* Generates or re-uses a Diffie-Hellman (D-H) private part.
* Generates a Responder Security Parameter Index (SPI).
* Stores the private part and peer public part in a half-open SA
database.
2. When the IKE_AUTH request arrives, the Responder:
* Derives the keys from the half-open SA.
* Decrypts the request.
3. If the IKE_AUTH request decrypts properly:
* Validates the certificate chain (if present) in the IKE_AUTH
request.
Yes, there's a stage 4 where the Responder actually creates Child
SAs, but when talking about (D)DoS, we never get to this stage.
Stage #1 is pretty light on CPU power, but requires some storage, and
it's very light for the Initiator as well. Stage #2 includes
private-key operations, so it's much heavier CPU-wise. Stage #3
includes public key operations, typically more than one.
To attack such a Responder, an attacker can attempt to either exhaust
memory or to exhaust CPU. Without any protection, the most efficient
attack is to send multiple IKE_SA_INIT requests and exhaust memory.
This should be easy because those requests are cheap.
There are obvious ways for the Responder to protect itself even
without changes to the protocol. It can reduce the time that an
entry remains in the half-open SA database, and it can limit the
amount of concurrent half-open SAs from a particular address or
prefix. The attacker can overcome this by using spoofed source
addresses.
The stateless cookie mechanism from Section 2.6 of [RFC7296] prevents
an attack with spoofed source addresses. This doesn't completely
solve the issue, but it makes the limiting of half-open SAs by
address or prefix work. Puzzles, introduced in Section 4.4, do the
same thing only more of it. They make it harder for an attacker to
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
reach the goal of getting a half-open SA. They don't have to be so
hard that an attacker can't afford to solve a single puzzle; it's
enough that they increase the cost of a half-open SAs for the
attacker so that it can create only a few.
Reducing the amount of time an abandoned half-open SA is kept attacks
the issue from the other side. It reduces the value the attacker
gets from managing to create a half-open SA. For example, if a half-
open SA is kept for 1 minute and the capacity is 60,000 half-open
SAs, an attacker would need to create 1,000 half-open SAs per second.
Reduce the retention time to 3 seconds, and the attacker needs to
create 20,000 half-open SAs per second. By introducing a puzzle,
each half-open SA becomes more expensive for an attacker, making it
more likely to thwart an exhaustion attack against Responder memory.
At this point, filling up the half-open SA database is no longer the
most efficient DoS attack. The attacker has two ways to do better:
1. Go back to spoofed addresses and try to overwhelm the CPU that
deals with generating cookies, or
2. Take the attack to the next level by also sending an IKE_AUTH
request.
It seems that the first thing cannot be dealt with at the IKE level.
It's probably better left to Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)
technology.
On the other hand, sending an IKE_AUTH request is surprisingly cheap.
It requires a proper IKE header with the correct IKE SPIs, and it
requires a single Encrypted payload. The content of the payload
might as well be junk. The Responder has to perform the relatively
expensive key derivation, only to find that the MAC on the Encrypted
payload on the IKE_AUTH request does not check. Depending on the
Responder implementation, this can be repeated with the same half-
open SA. Puzzles can make attacks of such sort more costly for an
attacker. See Section 7.2 for details.
Here too, the number of half-open SAs that the attacker can achieve
is crucial, because each one allows the attacker to waste some CPU
time. So making it hard to make many half-open SAs is important.
A strategy against DDoS has to rely on at least 4 components:
1. Hardening the half-open SA database by reducing retention time.
2. Hardening the half-open SA database by rate-limiting single IPs/
prefixes.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
3. Guidance on what to do when an IKE_AUTH request fails to decrypt.
4. Increasing cost of half-open SA up to what is tolerable for
legitimate clients.
Puzzles have their place as part of #4.
4. Defense Measures while IKE SA is being created
4.1. Retention Periods for Half-Open SAs
As a UDP-based protocol, IKEv2 has to deal with packet loss through
retransmissions. Section 2.4 of [RFC7296] recommends "that messages
be retransmitted at least a dozen times over a period of at least
several minutes before giving up". Retransmission policies in
practice wait at least one or two seconds before retransmitting for
the first time.
Because of this, setting the timeout on a half-open SA too low will
cause it to expire whenever even one IKE_AUTH request packet is lost.
When not under attack, the half-open SA timeout SHOULD be set high
enough that the Initiator will have enough time to send multiple
retransmissions, minimizing the chance of transient network
congestion causing IKE failure.
When the system is under attack, as measured by the amount of half-
open SAs, it makes sense to reduce this lifetime. The Responder
should still allow enough time for the round-trip, enough time for
the Initiator to derive the D-H shared value, and enough time to
derive the IKE SA keys and the create the IKE_AUTH request. Two
seconds is probably as low a value as can realistically be used.
It could make sense to assign a shorter value to half-open SAs
originating from IP addresses or prefixes that are considered suspect
because of multiple concurrent half-open SAs.
4.2. Rate Limiting
Even with DDoS, the attacker has only a limited amount of nodes
participating in the attack. By limiting the amount of half-open SAs
that are allowed to exist concurrently with each such node, the total
amount of half-open SAs is capped, as is the total amount of key
derivations that the Responder is forced to complete.
In IPv4 it makes sense to limit the number of half-open SAs based on
IP address. Most IPv4 nodes are either directly attached to the
Internet using a routable address or are hidden behind a NAT device
with a single IPv4 external address. For IPv6, ISPs assign between a
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
/48 and a /64, so it makes sense to use a 64-bit prefix as the basis
for rate limiting in IPv6.
The number of half-open SAs is easy to measure, but it is also
worthwhile to measure the number of failed IKE_AUTH exchanges. If
possible, both factors should be taken into account when deciding
which IP address or prefix is considered suspicious.
There are two ways to rate-limit a peer address or prefix:
1. Hard Limit - where the number of half-open SAs is capped, and any
further IKE_SA_INIT requests are rejected.
2. Soft Limit - where if a set number of half-open SAs exist for a
particular address or prefix, any IKE_SA_INIT request will
require solving a puzzle.
The advantage of the hard limit method is that it provides a hard cap
on the amount of half-open SAs that the attacker is able to create.
The downside is that it allows the attacker to block IKE initiation
from small parts of the Internet. For example, if an network service
provider or some establishment offers Internet connectivity to its
customers or employees through an IPv4 NAT device, a single malicious
customer can create enough half-open SAs to fill the quota for the
NAT device external IP address. Legitimate Initiators on the same
network will not be able to initiate IKE.
The advantage of a soft limit is that legitimate clients can always
connect. The disadvantage is that an adversary with sufficient CPU
resources can still effectively DoS the Responder.
Regardless of the type of rate-limiting used, there is a huge
advantage in blocking the DoS attack using rate-limiting for
legitimate clients that are away from the attacking nodes. In such
cases, adverse impacts caused by the attack or by the measures used
to counteract the attack can be avoided.
4.3. The Stateless Cookie
Section 2.6 of [RFC7296] offers a mechanism to mitigate DoS attack:
the stateless cookie. When the server is under load, the Responder
responds to the IKE_SA_INIT request with a calculated "stateless
cookie" - a value that can be re-calculated based on values in the
IKE_SA_INIT request without storing Responder-side state. The
Initiator is expected to repeat the IKE_SA_INIT request, this time
including the stateless cookie. This mechanism prevents DoS attacks
from spoofed IP addresses, since an attacker needs to have a routable
IP address to return the cookie.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
Attackers that have multiple source IP addresses with return
routability, such as in the case of bot-nets, can fill up a half-open
SA table anyway. The cookie mechanism limits the amount of allocated
state to the number of attackers, multiplied by the number of half-
open SAs allowed per peer address, multiplied by the amount of state
allocated for each half-open SA. With typical values this can easily
reach hundreds of megabytes.
4.4. Puzzles
The puzzle introduced here extends the cookie mechanism from
[RFC7296]. It is loosely based on the proof-of-work technique used
in Bitcoins [bitcoins]. This sets an upper bound, determined by the
attacker's CPU, to the number of negotiations it can initiate in a
unit of time.
A puzzle is sent to the Initiator in two cases:
o The Responder is so overloaded that no half-open SAs may be
created without solving a puzzle, or
o The Responder is not too loaded, but the rate-limiting method
described in Section 4.2 prevents half-open SAs from being created
with this particular peer address or prefix without first solving
a puzzle.
When the Responder decides to send the challenge notification in
response to a IKE_SA_INIT request, the notification includes three
fields:
1. Cookie - this is calculated the same as in [RFC7296], i.e. the
process of generating the cookie is not specified.
2. Algorithm, this is the identifier of a Pseudo-Random Function
(PRF) algorithm, one of those proposed by the Initiator in the SA
payload.
3. Zero Bit Count (ZBC). This is a number between 8 and 255 (or a
special value - 0, see Section 7.1.1.1) that represents the
length of the zero-bit run at the end of the output of the PRF
function calculated over the cookie that the Initiator is to
send. The values 1-8 are explicitly excluded, because they
create a puzzle that is too easy to solve for it to make any
difference in mitigating DDoS attacks. Since the mechanism is
supposed to be stateless for the Responder, either the same ZBC
is used for all Initiators, or the ZBC is somehow encoded in the
cookie. If it is global then it means that this value is the
same for all the Initiators who are receiving puzzles at any
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
given point of time. The Responder, however, may change this
value over time depending on its load.
Upon receiving this challenge, the Initiator attempts to calculate
the PRF using different keys. When enough keys are found such that
the resulting PRF output calculated using each of them has a
sufficient number of trailing zero bits, that result is sent to the
Responder.
The reason for using several keys in the results rather than just one
key is to reduce the variance in the time it takes the initiator to
solve the puzzle. We have chosen the number of keys to be four (4)
as a compromise between the conflicting goals of reducing variance
and reducing the work the Responder needs to perform to verify the
puzzle solution.
When receiving a request with a solved puzzle, the Responder verifies
two things:
o That the cookie part is indeed valid.
o That the PRFs of the transmitted cookie calculated with the
transmitted keys has a sufficient number of trailing zero bits.
Example 1: Suppose the calculated cookie is
739ae7492d8a810cf5e8dc0f9626c9dda773c5a3 (20 octets), the algorithm
is PRF-HMAC-SHA256, and the required number of zero bits is 18.
After successively trying a bunch of keys, the Initiator finds the
following four 3-octet keys that work:
+--------+----------------------------------+----------+
| Key | Last 32 Hex PRF Digits | # 0-bits |
+--------+----------------------------------+----------+
| 061840 | e4f957b859d7fb1343b7b94a816c0000 | 18 |
| 073324 | 0d4233d6278c96e3369227a075800000 | 23 |
| 0c8a2a | 952a35d39d5ba06709da43af40700000 | 20 |
| 0d94c8 | 5a0452b21571e401a3d00803679c0000 | 18 |
+--------+----------------------------------+----------+
Table 1: Three solutions for 18-bit puzzle
Example 2: Same cookie, but modify the required number of zero bits
to 22. The first 4-octet keys that work to satisfy that requirement
are 005d9e57, 010d8959, 0110778d, and 01187e37. Finding these
requires 18,382,392 invocations of the PRF.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
+----------+-------------------------------+
| # 0-bits | Time to Find 4 keys (seconds) |
+----------+-------------------------------+
| 8 | 0.0025 |
| 10 | 0.0078 |
| 12 | 0.0530 |
| 14 | 0.2521 |
| 16 | 0.8504 |
| 17 | 1.5938 |
| 18 | 3.3842 |
| 19 | 3.8592 |
| 20 | 10.8876 |
+----------+-------------------------------+
Table 2: The time needed to solve a puzzle of various difficulty for
the cookie = 739ae7492d8a810cf5e8dc0f9626c9dda773c5a3
The figures above were obtained on a 2.4 GHz single core i5. Run
times can be halved or quartered with multi-core code, but would be
longer on mobile phone processors, even if those are multi-core as
well. With these figures 18 bits is believed to be a reasonable
choice for puzzle level difficulty for all Initiators, and 20 bits is
acceptable for specific hosts/prefixes.
Using puzzles mechanism in the IKE_SA_INIT exchange is described in
Section 7.1.
4.5. Session Resumption
When the Responder is under attack, it MAY choose to prefer
previously authenticated peers who present a Session Resumption
ticket (see [RFC5723] for details). The Responder MAY require such
Initiators to pass a return routability check by including the COOKIE
notification in the IKE_SESSION_RESUME response message, as allowed
by Section 4.3.2. of [RFC5723]. Note that the Responder SHOULD cache
tickets for a short time to reject reused tickets (Section 4.3.1),
and therefore there should be no issue of half-open SAs resulting
from replayed IKE_SESSION_RESUME messages.
Several kinds of DoS attacks are possible on servers supported IKE
Session Resumption. See Section 9.3 of [RFC5723] for details.
4.6. Keeping computed Shared Keys
Once the IKE_SA_INIT exchange is finished, the Responder is waiting
for the first message of the IKE_AUTH exchange from the Initiator.
At this point the Initiator is not yet authenticated and this fact
allows a malicious peer to perform an attack, described in Section 3
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
- it can just send a garbage in the IKE_AUTH message thus forcing the
Responder to perform CPU costly operations to compute SK_* keys.
If the received IKE_AUTH message failed to decrypt correctly (or
failed to pass ICV check), then the Responder SHOULD still keep the
computed SK_* keys, so that if it happened to be an attack, then the
malicious Initiator cannot get advantage of repeating the attack
multiple times on a single IKE SA. The responder can also use
puzzles in the IKE_AUTH exchange as decribed in Section 7.2.
4.7. Preventing Attacks using "Hash and URL" Certificate Encoding
In IKEv2 each side may use "Hash and URL" Certificate Encoding to
instruct the peer to retrieve certificates from the specified
location (see Section 3.6 of [RFC7296] for details). Malicious
initiators can use this feature to mount a DoS attack on responder by
providing an URL pointing to a large file possibly containing
garbage. While downloading the file the responder consumes CPU,
memory and network bandwidth.
To prevent this kind of attacks the responder should not blindly
download the whole file. Instead it SHOULD first read the initial
few bytes, decode the length of the ASN.1 structure from these bytes,
and then download no more than the decoded number of bytes. Note,
that it is always possible to determine the length of ASN.1
structures used in IKEv2 by analyzing the first few bytes, if they
are DER-encoded. However, since the content of the file being
downloaded can be under attacker's control, implementations should
not blindly trust the decoded length and SHOULD check whether it
makes sense before continue downloading. Implementations SHOULD also
apply a configurable hard limit to the number of pulled bytes and
SHOULD provide an ability for an administrator to either completely
disable this feature or to limit its use to a configurable list of
trusted URLs.
4.8. IKE Fragmentation
IKE Fragmentation described in [RFC7383] allows IKE peers to avoid IP
fragmentation of large IKE messages. Attackers can mount several
kinds of DoS attacks using IKE Fragmentation. See Section 5 of
[RFC7383] for details.
5. Defense Measures after IKE SA is created
Once IKE SA is created there is usually not much traffic over it. In
most cases this traffic consists of exchanges aimed to create
additional Child SAs, rekey, or delete them and check the liveness of
the peer. With a typical setup and typical Child SA lifetimes, there
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 11]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
are typically no more than a few such exchanges, often less. Some of
these exchanges require relatively little resources (like liveness
check), while others may be resource consuming (like creating or
rekeying Child SA with D-H exchange).
Since any endpoint can initiate a new exchange, there is a
possibility that a peer would initiate too many exchanges that could
exhaust host resources. For example, the peer can perform endless
continuous Child SA rekeying or create overwhelming number of Child
SAs with the same Traffic Selectors etc. Such behavior may be caused
by buggy implementation, misconfiguration or be intentional. The
latter becomes more of a real threat if the peer uses NULL
Authentication, described in [RFC7619]. In this case the peer
remains anonymous, allowing it to escape any responsibility for its
actions. See Section 3 of [RFC7619] for details.
The following recommendations for defense against possible DoS
attacks after IKE SA is established are mostly intended for
implementations that allow unauthenticated IKE sessions; however,
they may also be useful in other cases.
o If the IKEv2 window size is greater than one, then the peer could
initiate multiple simultaneous exchanges that could increase host
resource consumption. Since currently there is no way in IKEv2 to
decrease window size once it was increased (see Section 2.3 of
[RFC7296]), the window size cannot be dynamically adjusted
depending on the load. For that reason, it is NOT RECOMMENDED to
ever increase the IKEv2 window size above its default value of one
if the peer uses NULL Authentication.
o If the peer initiates requests to rekey IKE SA or Child SA too
often, implementations can respond to some of these requests with
the TEMPORARY_FAILURE notification, indicating that the request
should be retried after some period of time.
o If the peer creates too many Child SA with the same or overlapping
Traffic Selectors, implementations can respond with the
NO_ADDITIONAL_SAS notification.
o If the peer initiates too many exchanges of any kind,
implementations can introduce an artificial delay before
responding to each request message. This delay would decrease the
rate the implementation need to process requests from any
particular peer, making it possible to process requests from the
others. Note, that if the Responder receives retransmissions of
the request message during the delay period, the retransmitted
messages should be silently discarded. The delay should not be
too long to avoid causing the IKE SA to be deleted on the other
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 12]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
end due to timeout. It is believed that a few seconds is enough.
Note however, that even a few seconds may be too long in those
settings, that rely on immediate response to the request message,
e.g. for the purposes of quick detection of a dead peer.
o If these counter-measures are inefficient, implementations can
delete the IKE SA with an offending peer by sending Delete
Payload.
In IKEv2 client can request various configuration attributes from
server. Most often those attributes include internal IP addresses.
Malicious clients can try to exhaust server's IP address pool by
continuously requesting a large number of internal addresses. Server
implementations SHOULD limit the number of IP addresses allocated to
any particular client. Note, that it is not possible with clients
using NULL Authentication, since their identity cannot be verified.
6. Plan for Defending a Responder
This section outlines a plan for defending a Responder from a DDoS
attack based on the techniques described earlier. The numbers given
here are not normative, and their purpose is to illustrate the
configurable parameters needed for defeating the DDoS attack.
Implementations may be deployed in different environments, so it is
RECOMMENDED that the parameters be settable. As an example, most
commercial products are required to undergo benchmarking where the
IKE SA establishment rate is measured. Benchmarking is
indistinguishable from a DoS attack and the defenses described in
this document may defeat the benchmark by causing exchanges to fail
or take a long time to complete. Parameters should be tunable to
allow for benchmarking (if only by turning DDoS protection off).
Since all countermeasures may cause delays and work on the
Initiators, they SHOULD NOT be deployed unless an attack is likely to
be in progress. To minimize the burden imposed on Initiators, the
Responder should monitor incoming IKE requests, searching for two
things:
1. A general DDoS attack. Such an attack is indicated by a high
number of concurrent half-open SAs, a high rate of failed
IKE_AUTH exchanges, or a combination of both. For example,
consider a Responder that has 10,000 distinct peers of which at
peak 7,500 concurrently have VPN tunnels. At the start of peak
time, 600 peers might establish tunnels at any given minute, and
tunnel establishment (both IKE_SA_INIT and IKE_AUTH) takes
anywhere from 0.5 to 2 seconds. For this Responder, we expect
there to be less than 20 concurrent half-open SAs, so having 100
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 13]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
concurrent half-open SAs can be interpreted as an indication of
an attack. Similarly, IKE_AUTH request decryption failures
should never happen. Supposing the the tunnels are established
using EAP (see Section 2.16 of [RFC7296]), users enter the wrong
password about 20% of the time. So we'd expect 125 wrong
password failures a minute. If we get IKE_AUTH decryption
failures from multiple sources more than once per second, or EAP
failure more than 300 times per minute, that can also be an
indication of a DDoS attack.
2. An attack from a particular IP address or prefix. Such an attack
is indicated by an inordinate amount of half-open SAs from that
IP address or prefix, or an inordinate amount of IKE_AUTH
failures. A DDoS attack may be viewed as multiple such attacks.
If they are mitigated well enough, there will not be a need enact
countermeasures on all Initiators. Typical measures might be 5
concurrent half-open SAs, 1 decrypt failure, or 10 EAP failures
within a minute.
Note that using counter-measures against an attack from a particular
IP address may be enough to avoid the overload on the half-open SA
database and in this case the number of failed IKE_AUTH exchanges
never exceeds the threshold of attack detection. This is a good
thing as it prevents Initiators that are not close to the attackers
from being affected.
When there is no general DDoS attack, it is suggested that no cookie
or puzzles be used. At this point the only defensive measure is the
monitoring of the number of half-open SAs, and setting a soft limit
per peer IP or prefix. The soft limit can be set to 3-5, and the
puzzle difficulty should be set to such a level (number of zero-bits)
that all legitimate clients can handle it without degraded user
experience.
As soon as any kind of attack is detected, either a lot of
initiations from multiple sources or a lot of initiations from a few
sources, it is best to begin by requiring stateless cookies from all
Initiators. This will force the attacker to use real source
addresses, and help avoid the need to impose a greater burden in the
form of cookies on the general population of Initiators. This makes
the per-node or per-prefix soft limit more effective.
When cookies are activated for all requests and the attacker is still
managing to consume too many resources, the Responder MAY increase
the difficulty of puzzles imposed on IKE_SA_INIT requests coming from
suspicious nodes/prefixes. It should still be doable by all
legitimate peers, but it can degrade experience, for example by
taking up to 10 seconds to solve the puzzle.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 14]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
If the load on the Responder is still too great, and there are many
nodes causing multiple half-open SAs or IKE_AUTH failures, the
Responder MAY impose hard limits on those nodes.
If it turns out that the attack is very widespread and the hard caps
are not solving the issue, a puzzle MAY be imposed on all Initiators.
Note that this is the last step, and the Responder should avoid this
if possible.
7. Using Puzzles in the Protocol
This section describes how the puzzle mechanism is used in IKEv2. It
is organized as follows. The Section 7.1 describes using puzzles in
the IKE_SA_INIT exchange and the Section 7.2 describes using puzzles
in the IKE_AUTH exchange. Both sections are divided into subsections
describing how puzzles should be presented, solved and processed by
the Initiator and the Responder.
7.1. Puzzles in IKE_SA_INIT Exchange
IKE Initiator indicates the desire to create a new IKE SA by sending
IKE_SA_INIT request message. The message may optionally contain a
COOKIE notification if this is a repeated request performed after the
Responder's demand to return a cookie.
HDR, [N(COOKIE),] SA, KE, Ni, [V+][N+] -->
According to the plan, described in Section 6, the IKE Responder
should monitor incoming requests to detect whether it is under
attack. If the Responder learns that (D)DoS attack is likely to be
in progress, then its actions depend on the volume of the attack. If
the volume is moderate, then the Responder requests the Initiator to
return a cookie. If the volume is so high, that puzzles need to be
used for defense, then the Responder requests the Initiator to solve
a puzzle.
The Responder MAY choose to process some fraction of IKE_SA_INIT
requests without presenting a puzzle while being under attack to
allow legacy clients, that don't support puzzles, to have a chance to
be served. The decision whether to process any particular request
must be probabilistic, with the probability depending on the
Responder's load (i.e. on the volume of attack). The requests that
don't contain the COOKIE notification MUST NOT participate in this
lottery. In other words, the Responder must first perform return
routability check before allowing any legacy client to be served if
it is under attack. See Section 7.1.4 for details.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 15]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
7.1.1. Presenting Puzzle
If the Responder makes a decision to use puzzles, then it MUST
include two notifications in its response message - the COOKIE
notification and the PUZZLE notification. The format of the PUZZLE
notification is described in Section 8.1.
<-- HDR, N(COOKIE), N(PUZZLE), [V+][N+]
The presence of these notifications in an IKE_SA_INIT response
message indicates to the Initiator that it should solve the puzzle to
get better chances to be served.
7.1.1.1. Selecting Puzzle Difficulty Level
The PUZZLE notification contains the difficulty level of the puzzle -
the minimum number of trailing zero bits that the result of PRF must
contain. In diverse environments it is next to impossible for the
Responder to set any specific difficulty level that will result in
roughly the same amount of work for all Initiators, because
computation power of different Initiators may vary by the order of
magnitude, or even more. The Responder may set difficulty level to
0, meaning that the Initiator is requested to spend as much power to
solve puzzle, as it can afford. In this case no specific value of
ZBC is required from the Initiator, however the larger the ZBC that
Initiator is able to get, the better the chances it will have to be
served by the Responder. In diverse environments it is RECOMMENDED
that the Initiator sets difficulty level to 0, unless the attack
volume is very high.
If the Responder sets non-zero difficulty level, then the level
should be determined by analyzing the volume of the attack. The
Responder MAY set different difficulty levels to different requests
depending on the IP address the request has come from.
7.1.1.2. Selecting Puzzle Algorithm
The PUZZLE notification also contains identifier of the algorithm,
that must be used by Initiator to compute puzzle.
Cryptographic algorithm agility is considered an important feature
for modern protocols ([RFC7696]). This feature ensures that protocol
doesn't rely on a single build-in set of cryptographic algorithms,
but has a means to replace one set with another and negotiate new set
with the peer. IKEv2 fully supports cryptographic algorithm agility
for its core operations.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 16]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
To support this feature in case of puzzles, the algorithm that is
used to compute puzzle needs to be negotiated during IKE_SA_INIT
exchange. The negotiation is performed as follows. The initial
request message sent by Initiator contains SA payload with the list
of transforms the Initiator supports and is willing to use in the IKE
SA being established. The Responder parses received SA payload and
finds mutually supported set of transforms of type PRF. It selects
most preferred transform from this set and includes it into the
PUZZLE notification. There is no requirement that the PRF selected
for puzzles be the same, as the PRF that is negotiated later for the
use in core IKE SA crypto operations. If there are no mutually
supported PRFs, then negotiation will fail anyway and there is no
reason to return a puzzle. In this case the Responder returns
NO_PROPOSAL_CHOSEN notification. Note that PRF is a mandatory
transform type for IKE SA (see Sections 3.3.2 and 3.3.3 of [RFC7296])
and at least one transform of this type must always be present in SA
payload in IKE_SA_INIT request message.
7.1.1.3. Generating Cookie
If Responder supports puzzles then cookie should be computed in such
a manner, that the Responder is able to learn some important
information from the sole cookie, when it is later returned back by
Initiator. In particular - the Responder should be able to learn the
following information:
o Whether the puzzle was given to the Initiator or only the cookie
was requested.
o The difficulty level of the puzzle given to the Initiator.
o The number of consecutive puzzles given to the Initiator.
o The amount of time the Initiator spent to solve the puzzles. This
can be calculated if the cookie is timestamped.
This information helps the Responder to make a decision whether to
serve this request or demand more work from the Initiator.
One possible approach to get this information is to encode it in the
cookie. The format of such encoding is a local matter of Responder,
as the cookie would remain an opaque blob to the Initiator. If this
information is encoded in the cookie, then the Responder MUST make it
integrity protected, so that any intended or accidental alteration of
this information in returned cookie is detectable. So, the cookie
would be generated as:
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 17]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
Cookie = <VersionIDofSecret> | <AdditionalInfo> |
Hash(Ni | IPi | SPIi | <AdditionalInfo> | <secret>)
Alternatively, the Responder may continue to generate cookie as
suggested in Section 2.6 of [RFC7296], but associate the additional
information, that would be stored locally, with the particular
version of the secret. In this case the Responder should have
different secrets for every combination of difficulty level and
number of consecutive puzzles, and should change the secrets
periodically, keeping a few previous versions, to be able to
calculate how long ago the cookie was generated.
The Responder may also combine these approaches. This document
doesn't mandate how the Responder learns this information from the
cookie.
7.1.2. Solving Puzzle and Returning the Solution
If the Initiator receives a puzzle but it doesn't support puzzles,
then it will ignore the PUZZLE notification as an unrecognized status
notification (in accordance to Section 3.10.1 of [RFC7296]). The
Initiator also MAY ignore the PUZZLE notification if it is not
willing to spend resources to solve the puzzle of the requested
difficulty, even if it supports puzzles. In both cases the Initiator
acts as described in Section 2.6 of [RFC7296] - it restarts the
request and includes the received COOKIE notification into it. The
Responder should be able to distinguish the situation when it just
requested a cookie from the situation when the puzzle was given to
the Initiator, but the Initiator for some reason ignored it.
If the received message contains a PUZZLE notification and doesn't
contain a COOKIE notification, then this message is malformed because
it requests to solve the puzzle, but doesn't provide enough
information to do it. In this case the Initiator MUST ignore the
received message and continue to wait until either the valid one is
received or the retransmission timer fires. If it fails to receive
the valid message after several retransmissions of IKE_SA_INIT
request, then it means that something is wrong and the IKE SA cannot
be established.
If the Initiator supports puzzles and is ready to deal with them,
then it tries to solve the given puzzle. After the puzzle is solved
the Initiator restarts the request and returns the puzzle solution in
a new payload called a Puzzle Solution payload (denoted as PS, see
Section 8.2) along with the received COOKIE notification back to the
Responder.
HDR, N(COOKIE), [PS,] SA, KE, Ni, [V+][N+] -->
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 18]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
7.1.3. Computing Puzzle
General principals of constructing puzzles in IKEv2 are described in
Section 4.4. They can be summarized as follows: given unpredictable
string S and pseudo-random function PRF find N different keys Ki
(where i=[1..N]) for that PRF so that the result of PRF(Ki,S) has at
least the specified number of trailing zero bits. This specification
requires that the solution to the puzzle contains 4 different keys
(i.e. N=4).
In the IKE_SA_INIT exchange it is the cookie that plays the role of
unpredictable string S. In other words, in IKE_SA_INIT the task for
the IKE Initiator is to find the four different, equal-sized keys Ki
for the agreed upon PRF such that each result of PRF(Ki,cookie) where
i = [1..4] has a sufficient number of trailing zero bits. Only the
content of the COOKIE notification is used in puzzle calculation,
i.e. the header of the Notification payload is not included.
Note, that puzzles in the IKE_AUTH exchange are computed differently
than in the IKE_SA_INIT_EXCHANGE. See Section 7.2.3 for details.
7.1.4. Analyzing Repeated Request
The received request must at least contain a COOKIE notification.
Otherwise it is an initial request and it must be processed according
to Section 7.1. First, the cookie MUST be checked for validity. If
the cookie is invalid, then the request is treated as initial and is
processed according to Section 7.1. It is RECOMMENDED that a new
cookie is requested in this case.
If the cookie is valid then some important information is learned
from it or from local state based on identifier of the cookie's
secret (see Section 7.1.1.3 for details). This information helps the
Responder to sort out incoming requests, giving more priority to
those of them, which were created by spending more of the Initiator's
resources.
First, the Responder determines if it requested only a cookie, or
presented a puzzle to the Initiator. If no puzzle was given, then it
means that at the time the Responder requested a cookie it didn't
detect the (D)DoS attack or the attack volume was low. In this case
the received request message must not contain the PS payload, and
this payload MUST be ignored if for any reason the message contains
it. Since no puzzle was given, the Responder marks the request with
the lowest priority since the Initiator spent little resources
creating it.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 19]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
If the Responder learns from the cookie that the puzzle was given to
the Initiator, then it looks for the PS payload to determine whether
its request to solve the puzzle was honored or not. If the incoming
message doesn't contain a PS payload, then it means that the
Initiator either doesn't support puzzles or doesn't want to deal with
them. In either case the request is marked with the lowest priority
since the Initiator spent little resources creating it.
If a PS payload is found in the message, then the Responder MUST
verify the puzzle solution that it contains. The solution is
interpreted as four different keys. The result of using each of them
in the PRF (as described in Section 7.1.3) must contain at least the
requested number of trailing zero bits. The Responder MUST check all
the four returned keys.
If any checked result contains fewer bits than were requested, it
means that the Initiator spent less resources than expected by the
Responder. This request is marked with the lowest priority.
If the Initiator provided the solution to the puzzle satisfying the
requested difficulty level, or if the Responder didn't indicate any
particular difficulty level (by setting ZBC to zero) and the
Initiator was free to select any difficulty level it can afford, then
the priority of the request is calculated based on the following
considerations:
o The Responder must take the smallest number of trailing zero bits
among the checked results and count it as the number of zero bits
the Initiator got.
o The higher number of zero bits the Initiator got, the higher
priority its request should receive.
o The more consecutive puzzles the Initiator solved, the higher
priority it should receive.
o The more time the Initiator spent solving the puzzles, the higher
priority it should receive.
After the priority of the request is determined the final decision
whether to serve it or not is made.
7.1.5. Making Decision whether to Serve the Request
The Responder decides what to do with the request based on its
priority and Responder's current load. There are three possible
actions:
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 20]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
o Accept request.
o Reject request.
o Demand more work from Initiator by giving it a new puzzle.
The Responder SHOULD accept an incoming request if its priority is
high - it means that the Initiator spent quite a lot of resources.
The Responder MAY also accept some of low-priority requests where the
Initiators don't support puzzles. The percentage of accepted legacy
requests depends on the Responder's current load.
If the Initiator solved the puzzle, but didn't spend much resources
for it (the selected puzzle difficulty level appeared to be low and
the Initiator solved it quickly), then the Responder SHOULD give it
another puzzle. The more puzzles the Initiator solves the higher its
chances are to be served.
The details of how the Responder makes a decision for any particular
request, are implementation dependent. The Responder can collect all
the incoming requests for some short period of time, sort them out
based on their priority, calculate the number of available memory
slots for half-open IKE SAs and then serve that number of requests
from the head of the sorted list. The rest of requests can be either
discarded or responded to with new puzzles.
Alternatively, the Responder may decide whether to accept every
incoming request with some kind of lottery, taking into account its
priority and the available resources.
7.2. Puzzles in IKE_AUTH Exchange
Once the IKE_SA_INIT exchange is completed, the Responder has created
a state and is waiting for the first message of the IKE_AUTH exchange
from the Initiator. At this point the Initiator has already passed
return routability check and has proved that it has performed some
work to complete IKE_SA_INIT exchange. However, the Initiator is not
yet authenticated and this fact allows malicious Initiator to perform
an attack, described in Section 3. Unlike DoS attack in IKE_SA_INIT
exchange, which is targeted on the Responder's memory resources, the
goal of this attack is to exhaust a Responder's CPU power. The
attack is performed by sending the first IKE_AUTH message containing
garbage. This costs nothing to the Initiator, but the Responder has
to do relatively costly operations of computing the D-H shared secret
and deriving SK_* keys to be able to verify authenticity of the
message. If the Responder doesn't keep the computed keys after an
unsuccessful verification of the IKE_AUTH message, then the attack
can be repeated several times on the same IKE SA.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 21]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
The Responder can use puzzles to make this attack more costly for the
Initiator. The idea is that the Responder includes a puzzle in the
IKE_SA_INIT response message and the Initiator includes a puzzle
solution in the first IKE_AUTH request message outside the Encrypted
payload, so that the Responder is able to verify puzzle solution
before computing D-H shared secret. The difficulty level of the
puzzle should be selected so that the Initiator would spend
substantially more time to solve the puzzle than the Responder to
compute the shared secret.
The Responder should constantly monitor the amount of the half-open
IKE SA states that receive IKE_AUTH messages that cannot be decrypted
due to integrity check failures. If the percentage of such states is
high and it takes an essential fraction of Responder's computing
power to calculate keys for them, then the Responder may assume that
it is under attack and SHOULD use puzzles to make it harder for
attackers.
7.2.1. Presenting Puzzle
The Responder requests the Initiator to solve a puzzle by including
the PUZZLE notification in the IKE_SA_INIT response message. The
Responder MUST NOT use puzzles in the IKE_AUTH exchange unless the
puzzle has been previously presented and solved in the preceding
IKE_SA_INIT exchange.
<-- HDR, SA, KE, Nr, N(PUZZLE), [V+][N+]
7.2.1.1. Selecting Puzzle Difficulty Level
The difficulty level of the puzzle in IKE_AUTH exchange should be
chosen so that the Initiator would spend more time to solve the
puzzle than the Responder to compute the D-H shared secret and the
keys, needed to decrypt and verify the IKE_AUTH request message. On
the other hand, the difficulty level should not be too high,
otherwise the legitimate clients would experience an additional delay
while establishing IKE SA.
Note, that since puzzles in the IKE_AUTH exchange are only allowed to
be used if they were used in the preceding IKE_SA_INIT exchange, the
Responder would be able to estimate the computational power of the
Initiator and to select the difficulty level accordingly. Unlike
puzzles in IKE_SA_INIT, the requested difficulty level for IKE_AUTH
puzzles MUST NOT be zero. In other words, the Responder must always
set specific difficulty level and must not let the Initiator to
choose it on its own.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 22]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
7.2.1.2. Selecting Puzzle Algorithm
The algorithm for the puzzle is selected as described in
Section 7.1.1.2. There is no requirement, that the algorithm for the
puzzle in the IKE_SA INIT exchange be the same, as the algorithm for
the puzzle in IKE_AUTH exchange, however it is expected that in most
cases they will be the same.
7.2.2. Solving Puzzle and Returning the Solution
If the IKE_SA_INIT response message contains the PUZZLE notification
and the Initiator supports puzzles, it MUST solve the puzzle. Note,
that puzzle construction in the IKE_AUTH exchange differs from the
puzzle construction in the IKE_SA_INIT exchange and is described in
Section 7.2.3. Once the puzzle is solved the Initiator sends the
IKE_AUTH request message, containing the Puzzle Solution payload.
HDR, PS, SK {IDi, [CERT,] [CERTREQ,]
[IDr,] AUTH, SA, TSi, TSr} -->
The Puzzle Solution payload MUST be placed outside the Encrypted
payload, so that the Responder would be able to verify the puzzle
before calculating the D-H shared secret and the SK_* keys.
If IKE Fragmentation [RFC7383] is used in IKE_AUTH exchange, then the
PS payload MUST be present only in the first IKE Fragment message, in
accordance with the Section 2.5.3 of [RFC7383]. Note, that
calculation of the puzzle in the IKE_AUTH exchange doesn't depend on
the content of the IKE_AUTH message (see Section 7.2.3). Thus the
Initiator has to solve the puzzle only once and the solution is valid
for both unfragmented and fragmented IKE messages.
7.2.3. Computing Puzzle
The puzzles in the IKE_AUTH exchange are computed differently than in
the IKE_SA_INIT exchange (see Section 7.1.3). The general principle
is the same; the difference is in the construction of the string S.
Unlike the IKE_SA_INIT exchange, where S is the cookie, in the
IKE_AUTH exchange S is a concatenation of Nr and SPIr. In other
words, the task for IKE Initiator is to find the four different keys
Ki for the agreed upon PRF such that each result of PRF(Ki,Nr | SPIr)
where i=[1..4] has a sufficient number of trailing zero bits. Nr is
a nonce used by the Responder in IKE_SA_INIT exchange, stripped of
any headers. SPIr is IKE Responder's SPI from the IKE header of the
SA being established.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 23]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
7.2.4. Receiving Puzzle Solution
If the Responder requested the Initiator to solve a puzzle in the
IKE_AUTH exchange, then it MUST silently discard all the IKE_AUTH
request messages without the Puzzle Solution payload.
Once the message containing a solution to the puzzle is received, the
Responder MUST verify the solution before performing computationlly
intensive operations i.e. computing the D-H shared secret and the
SK_* keys. The Responder MUST verify all the four returned keys.
The Responder MUST silently discard the received message if any
checked verification result is not correct (contains insufficient
number of trailing zero bits). If the Responder successfully
verifies the puzzle and calculates the SK_* key, but the message
authenticity check fails, then it SHOULD save the calculated keys in
the IKE SA state while waiting for the retransmissions from the
Initiator. In this case the Responder may skip verification of the
puzzle solution and ignore the Puzzle Solution payload in the
retransmitted messages.
If the Initiator uses IKE Fragmentation, then it is possible, that
due to packet loss and/or reordering the Responder could receive non-
first IKE Fragment messages before receiving the first one,
containing the PS payload. In this case the Responder MAY choose to
keep the received fragments until the first fragment containing the
solution to the puzzle is received. However, in this case the
Responder SHOULD NOT try to verify authenticity of the kept fragments
until the first fragment with the PS payload is received and the
solution to the puzzle is verified. After successful verification of
the puzzle the Responder could calculate the SK_* key and verify
authenticity of the collected fragments.
8. Payload Formats
8.1. PUZZLE Notification
The PUZZLE notification is used by the IKE Responder to inform the
Initiator about the necessity to solve the puzzle. It contains the
difficulty level of the puzzle and the PRF the Initiator should use.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 24]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Next Payload |C| RESERVED | Payload Length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
|Protocol ID(=0)| SPI Size (=0) | Notify Message Type |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| PRF | Difficulty |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
o Protocol ID (1 octet) -- MUST be 0.
o SPI Size (1 octet) - MUST be 0, meaning no Security Parameter
Index (SPI) is present.
o Notify Message Type (2 octets) -- MUST be <TBA by IANA>, the value
assigned for the PUZZLE notification.
o PRF (2 octets) -- Transform ID of the PRF algorithm that must be
used to solve the puzzle. Readers should refer to the section
"Transform Type 2 - Pseudo-Random Function Transform IDs" in
[IKEV2-IANA] for the list of possible values.
o Difficulty (1 octet) -- Difficulty Level of the puzzle. Specifies
minimum number of trailing zero bits (ZBC), that each of the
results of PRF must contain. Value 0 means that the Responder
doesn't request any specific difficulty level and the Initiator is
free to select appropriate difficulty level on its own (see
Section 7.1.1.1 for details).
This notification contains no data.
8.2. Puzzle Solution Payload
The solution to the puzzle is returned back to the Responder in a
dedicated payload, called the Puzzle Solution payload and denoted as
PS in this document.
1 2 3
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| Next Payload |C| RESERVED | Payload Length |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
| |
~ Puzzle Solution Data ~
| |
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 25]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
o Puzzle Solution Data (variable length) -- Contains the solution to
the puzzle - four different keys for the selected PRF. This field
MUST NOT be empty. All the keys MUST have the same size,
therefore the size of this field is always a mutiple of 4 bytes.
If the selected PRF accepts only fixed-size keys, then the size of
each key MUST be of that fixed size. If the PRF agreed upon
accepts keys of any size, then then the size of each key MUST be
between 1 octet and the preferred key length of the PRF
(inclusive). It is expected that in most cases the keys will be 4
(or even less) octets in length, however it depends on puzzle
difficulty and on the Initiator's strategy to find solutions, and
thus the size is not mandated by this specification. The
Responder determines the size of each key by dividing the size of
the Puzzle Solution Data by 4 (the number of keys). Note that the
size of Puzzle Solution Data is the size of Payload (as indicated
in Payload Length field) minus 4 - the size of Payload Header.
The payload type for the Puzzle Solution payload is <TBA by IANA>.
9. Operational Considerations
The difficulty level should be set by balancing the requirement to
minimize the latency for legitimate Initiators and making things
difficult for attackers. A good rule of thumb is for taking about 1
second to solve the puzzle. A typical Initiator or bot-net member in
2014 can perform slightly less than a million hashes per second per
core, so setting the difficulty level to n=20 is a good compromise.
It should be noted that mobile Initiators, especially phones are
considerably weaker than that. Implementations should allow
administrators to set the difficulty level, and/or be able to set the
difficulty level dynamically in response to load.
Initiators should set a maximum difficulty level beyond which they
won't try to solve the puzzle and log or display a failure message to
the administrator or user.
10. Security Considerations
When selecting parameters for the puzzles, in particular the puzzle
difficulty, care must be taken. If the puzzles appeared too easy for
majority of the attackers, then the puzzles mechanism wouldn't be
able to prevent DoS attack and would only impose an additional burden
on the legitimate Initiators. On the other hand, if the puzzles
appeared to be too hard for majority of the Initiators then many
legitimate users would experience unacceptable delay in IKE SA setup
(or unacceptable power consumption on mobile devices), that might
cause them to cancel connection attempt. In this case the resources
of the Responder are preserved, however the DoS attack can be
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 26]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
considered successful. Thus a sensible balance should be kept by the
Responder while choosing the puzzle difficulty - to defend itself and
to not over-defend itself. It is RECOMMENDED that the puzzle
difficulty be chosen so, that the Responder's load remain close to
the maximum it can tolerate. It is also RECOMMENDED to dynamically
adjust the puzzle difficulty in accordance to the current Responder's
load.
Solving puzzles requires a lot of CPU power, that would increase
power consumption. This would influence battery-powered Initiators,
e.g. mobile phones or some IoT devices. If puzzles are hard then the
required additional power consumption may appear to be unacceptable
for some Initiators. The Responder SHOULD take this possibility into
considerations while choosing the puzzles difficulty and while
selecting which percentage of Initiators are allowed to reject
solving puzzles. See Section 7.1.4 for details.
If the Initiator uses NULL Authentication [RFC7619] then its identity
is never verified, that may be used by attackers to perform DoS
attack after IKE SA is established. Responders that allow
unauthenticated Initiators to connect must be prepared to deal with
various kinds of DoS attacks even after IKE SA is created. See
Section 5 for details.
To prevent amplification attacks implementations must strictly follow
the retransmission rules described in Section 2.1 of [RFC7296].
11. IANA Considerations
This document defines a new payload in the "IKEv2 Payload Types"
registry:
<TBA> Puzzle Solution PS
This document also defines a new Notify Message Type in the "IKEv2
Notify Message Types - Status Types" registry:
<TBA> PUZZLE
12. Acknowledgements
The authors thank Tero Kivinen, Yaron Sheffer and Scott Fluhrer for
their contribution into design of the protocol. In particular, Tero
Kivinen suggested the kind of puzzle where the task is to find a
solution with requested number of zero trailing bits. Yaron Sheffer
and Scott Fluhrer suggested a way to make puzzle difficulty less
erratic by solving several weaker puzles. The authors also thank
David Waltermire for his carefull review of the document, Graham
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 27]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
Bartlett for pointing out to the possibility of "Hash & URL" related
attack, and all others who commented the document.
13. References
13.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC7296] Kaufman, C., Hoffman, P., Nir, Y., Eronen, P., and T.
Kivinen, "Internet Key Exchange Protocol Version 2
(IKEv2)", STD 79, RFC 7296, DOI 10.17487/RFC7296, October
2014, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7296>.
[RFC7383] Smyslov, V., "Internet Key Exchange Protocol Version 2
(IKEv2) Message Fragmentation", RFC 7383,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7383, November 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7383>.
[IKEV2-IANA]
"Internet Key Exchange Version 2 (IKEv2) Parameters",
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/ikev2-parameters>.
13.2. Informative References
[bitcoins]
Nakamoto, S., "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash
System", October 2008, <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>.
[RFC5723] Sheffer, Y. and H. Tschofenig, "Internet Key Exchange
Protocol Version 2 (IKEv2) Session Resumption", RFC 5723,
DOI 10.17487/RFC5723, January 2010,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5723>.
[RFC7619] Smyslov, V. and P. Wouters, "The NULL Authentication
Method in the Internet Key Exchange Protocol Version 2
(IKEv2)", RFC 7619, DOI 10.17487/RFC7619, August 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7619>.
[RFC7696] Housley, R., "Guidelines for Cryptographic Algorithm
Agility and Selecting Mandatory-to-Implement Algorithms",
BCP 201, RFC 7696, DOI 10.17487/RFC7696, November 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7696>.
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 28]
Internet-Draft DDoS Protection for IKEv2 April 2016
Authors' Addresses
Yoav Nir
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.
5 Hasolelim st.
Tel Aviv 6789735
Israel
EMail: ynir.ietf@gmail.com
Valery Smyslov
ELVIS-PLUS
PO Box 81
Moscow (Zelenograd) 124460
Russian Federation
Phone: +7 495 276 0211
EMail: svan@elvis.ru
Nir & Smyslov Expires October 17, 2016 [Page 29]
