Re: How should NAT terminate ?

From: TC Wolsey (twolseyat_private)
Date: Mon Jan 10 2000 - 07:11:06 PST

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    > Darren Reed <darrenrat_private> 01/10/00 03:13AM >>>
    >
    >Here's something for folks out there to have a think about.
    >
    >You have your dialup PC, sitting at home, gatewaying your
    >workstation from which you surf away on the web.  Your link
    >drops, you redial and get a new IP# for your NAT sessions.
    >
    >For at least some period of time, your old IP# may be black
    >holed, or worse, allocated to another Internet user.  The
    >second case is worse because small amounts of your web session
    >*may* leak to someone else.
    >
    >Whatever the case, there is a period of time in which the original
    >endpoints believe a connection exists, which no longer does.  Should
    >a pre-emptive strike be lunched by the firewall to blow these away
    >by doing something like sending TCP RST's ?  What about for DNS/NTP
    >queries - are ICMP unreachables appropriate ?
    >
    >Darren
    >
    
    Attempting to terminate the connection seems like a good idea, but how is it done reliably in an environment where the firewall does not terminate the data-link connection to one side of the connection? In a dialup environment I would guess that you would look for host/destination unreachables from some point inside the firewall and close the connections based on that info. Of course that would require filtering on each line to prevent a DoS where one inside attacker host spoofs unreachables which would cause the firewall to close active connections to the victim host. What happens in a broadcast capable environment where the blackhole exists for a longer period (say an arp timeout)? Also in this environment the unreachables have to be filtered at two layers, the typically static data-link and the dynamic network. 
    
    Regards,
    
    --tcw
    



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