netfilter: conntrack: disable generic tracking for known protocols

Given following iptables ruleset:

-P FORWARD DROP
-A FORWARD -m sctp --dport 9 -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
-A FORWARD -p tcp -m conntrack -m state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

One would assume that this allows SCTP on port 9 and TCP on port 80.
Unfortunately, if the SCTP conntrack module is not loaded, this allows
*all* SCTP communication, to pass though, i.e. -p sctp -j ACCEPT,
which we think is a security issue.

This is because on the first SCTP packet on port 9, we create a dummy
"generic l4" conntrack entry without any port information (since
conntrack doesn't know how to extract this information).

All subsequent packets that are unknown will then be in established
state since they will fallback to proto_generic and will match the
'generic' entry.

Our originally proposed version [1] completely disabled generic protocol
tracking, but Jozsef suggests to not track protocols for which a more
suitable helper is available, hence we now mitigate the issue for in
tree known ct protocol helpers only, so that at least NAT and direction
information will still be preserved for others.

 [1] http://www.spinics.net/lists/netfilter-devel/msg33430.html

Joint work with Daniel Borkmann.

Signed-off-by: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jozsef Kadlecsik <kadlec@blackhole.kfki.hu>
Signed-off-by: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions