Catching Corrupted OSPF Packets!

I was having a discussion with Paul Jakma (a friend, co-author in a few IETF drafts, a routing protocols expert, the guy behind Quagga, the list just goes on ..) some time back on a weird problem that he came across at a customer network where the OSPF packets were being corrupted in between being read off the wire and having CRC and IP checksum verified and being delivered to OSPF stack. While the problem was repeatable within 30 minutes on that particular network, he could never reproduce it on his VM network (and neither could the folks who reported this problem).

Eventually, for some inexplicable reason, he asked them to turn on MD5 authentication (with a tweak to drop duplicate sequence number packets – duplicate packets as the trigger of the problems being a theory). With this, their problems changed from “weird” to “adjacencies just start dropping, with lots of log messages about MD5 failures”!

So it appears that the customer had some kind of corruption bug in custom parts of their network stack, on input, such that OSPF gets handed a good long sequence of corrupt packets – all of which  (we dont know how many) seem to pass the internet checksum and then cause very odd problems for OSPF.

So, is this a realistic scenario and can this actually happen? While i have personally never experienced this, there are chances of this happening because of any of the following reasons:

o PCI transmission error (PCI parallel had parity checks, but not always enabled, PCI express has a 32bit CRC though)

o memory bus error (though, all routers and hosts should use ECC RAM)

o bad memory (same)

o bad cache (CPUs don’t always ECC their caches – Sun its seems was badly bitten by this; While the last few generations of Intel and AMD CPU do this, what about all those embedded CPUs that we use in the routers?)

o logic errors, particularly in network hardware drivers

o finally, CRCs and the internet checksum are not very good and its not impossible for wire-corrupted packets to get past link, IP AND OSPF CRC/checksums.

The internet checksum, which is used for the OSPF packet checksum, is incredibly weak. There are various papers out there, particularly ones by Partridge (who helped author the internet checksum RFC!) which cover this, basically it offers very little protection:

– it can’t detect re-ordering of 2-byte aligned words
– it can’t detect various bit flips that keep the 1s complement sum the same (e.g. 0x0000 to 0xffff and vice versa)

Even the link-layer CRC also is not perfect, and Partridge has co-authored papers detailling how corrupted packets can even get past both CRC and internet checksum.

So what choice do the operators have for catching corrupted packets in the SW?

Well, they could either use the incredibly poor internet checksum that exists today or they could turn on cryptographic authentication (keyed MD5 with RFC 2328 or different HMAC-SHA variants with RFC 5709) and catch all such failures. The former would not always work as there are errors that can creep in with these algorithms. The latter would work but there are certain disadvantages  is using cryptographic HMACs purely for integrity checking. The algorithms require more computation, which may be noticable on less powerful and/or energy-sensitive platforms. Additionally, the need to configure and synchronize the keying material is an additional administrative burden. I had posted a survey on Nanog some time back where i had asked the operators if they had ever turned on crypto protection to detect such failures and i received a couple of responses offline where they alluded to doing this to prevent checksum failures.

Paul and I wrote a short IETF draft some time back where we propose to change the checksum algorithm used for verifying OSPFv2 and OSPFv3 packets. We would only like to upgrade the very weak packet checksum with something thats more stronger without having to go with the full crypto hash protection way. You can find all the gory details here!