BEEPcore broken w.r.t. TCP

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Working these days on a research prototype with the lasted
implementation of BEEP available from www.beepcore.org we discovered a
serious flaw.

Obviously the library does not issue TCP's CLOSE command after having
received the CLOSING primitive which is received as a result of an TCP
packet flagged with FIN. Actually, the ACK flagged message is sent back
to the client by the server, but the required FIN message is missing.

As a result of this the TCP connection of the server side remains in
status CLOSE_WAITING almost forever until the process is killed or the
machine is rebooted.

This can be reproduced under various Linux versions including the latest
kernel (i.e., 2.6.3) and even machines running Windows. Fortunately,
Windows (XP) limits the number of processed in state CLOSE_WAITING to 15
per process and cleans the open connections without user interaction
automatically if an additional one reaches the mentioned state.

Concerning Unix/Linux versions (the problem of remaining CLOSE_WAITING
connections is also reported for HP UX) this behavior of BEEPcore might
introduce the possibility of attacking the machine running BEEP since
the server will run out of free sockets after a while.

Could you please re-check this since it hinders us from using BEEP in
practice.

Also feedback on this issue and even potential mistakes from our side is
highly appreciated.

Best,
Mario

- --
Prof. Mario Jeckle
University of Applied Sciences Furtwangen
Dept. Business Applications of Computer Science

W3C Representative of DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology
OMG Representative of DaimlerChrysler

URL: http://www.jeckle.de
MailTo:[email protected]
MailTo:[email protected]

My public key: http://www.jeckle.de/marioJeckle.pub

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