Re: TCP Urgent data causes HTTPInspect to fail and prevents PAF to flush

Thanks for the reply and the RFC.

The issue affects snort 2.9.9.0 too. The one-line patch below makes
PAF skip urgent data, please let me know if you see any problem with
it.


Thanks,

-----------------
From: "Pierre Nicolas-Nicolaz, Future Systems"
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2016 10:33:24 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Make PAF skip urgent data

---
 src/preprocessors/Stream6/snort_stream_tcp.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/src/preprocessors/Stream6/snort_stream_tcp.c
b/src/preprocessors/Stream6/snort_stream_tcp.c
index 1280d1e..e18b628 100644
--- a/src/preprocessors/Stream6/snort_stream_tcp.c
+++ b/src/preprocessors/Stream6/snort_stream_tcp.c
@@ -9753,7 +9753,7 @@ static inline uint32_t flush_pdu_ips (
StreamTcpConfig *config, TcpSession *ssn,
         wire_packet = pkt;
         flush_policy_for_dir = trk->flush_mgr.flush_policy;
         flush_pt = s5_paf_check( config->paf_config, &trk->paf_state, ssn->scb,
-                                 seg->payload, size, total, seg->seq, srv_port,
+                                 seg->payload+seg->urg_offset, size,
total, seg->seq, srv_port,
                                  flags, trk->flush_mgr.flush_pt);
         if (*flags & PKT_PURGE)
         {
-- 
2.9.3

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Russ <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for raising the issue.  Snort does some target-based handling of
> urgent data and we should ensure that PAF skips any urgent data that will
> not be flushed.  Urgent data is in general an unreliable mechanism and
> inline deployments should enable normalization to scrub the urgent pointer
> and offset.  See RFC 6093 for a summary of the issues with the
> implementation of the TCP urgent mechanism.
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6093
>
>
> On 12/12/16 11:14 PM, hey wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>
> While doing some testing with Snort, I noticed that Stream with PAF sends
> the urgent data part of a TCP segment to HTTPInspect finite state machine.
>
> For example, if the urgent pointer is set to 1 and if the urgent data is
> "odd" (e.g. 0x00) HTTPInspect will fail and flushing won't happen as
> desired; but if urgent data is "ok" (e.g. 0x41 'A') flushing will be fine.
>
> This is a bit problematic with some configurations ignoring urgent data
> (AFAIK at least Apache on top of Linux does that). If snort is inline and if
> we want to drop the malicious packet, the flushing will only happen when
> snort sees a RST packet (thus we just see a snort alert later and the
> malicious packet has not been dropped).
>
>
> It wouldn't be too complicated to make HTTPInspect skip the urgent data, or
> to make a new HTTPInspect configuration option to choose to skip or not the
> data. I'm curious to know why it hasn't been done (if I misunderstood
> something).
>
> On a broader scope, I'm interested in how Snort deals with urgent data. Is
> there any particular  technique/configuration recommendation? I'm aware of
> papers such as [1] and [2] but I'm curious to know if there is anything that
> goes deeper for the URG flag.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> [1] Novak, Judy, and Steve Sturges. "Target-Based TCP Stream Reassembly."
> [2] Novak, Judy, and Steve Sturges. "Target-Based TCP Timestamp Stream
> Reassembly."
>
>
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