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Capec-494 Detail

TCP Fragmentation

Standard Communications Software

Parents: 130

Threats: T61 T64 T74 T77 T264 T265 T269 T282 T289 T308 T309 T374 T401

Description

An adversary may execute a TCP Fragmentation attack against a target with the intention of avoiding filtering rules of network controls, by attempting to fragment the TCP packet such that the headers flag field is pushed into the second fragment which typically is not filtered.

Extended Description

In comparison, IP fragmentation occurs when an IP datagram is larger than the MTU of the route the datagram has to traverse. This behavior of fragmentation defeats some IPS and firewall filters who typically check the FLAGS in the header of the first packet since dropping this packet prevents the following fragments from being processed and assembled. Another variation is overlapping fragments thus that an innocuous first segment passes the filter and the second segment overwrites the TCP header data with the true payload which is malicious in nature. The malicious payload manipulated properly may lead to a DoS due to resource consumption or kernel crash. Additionally the fragmentation could be used in conjunction with sending fragments at a rate slightly slower than the timeout to cause a DoS condition by forcing resources that assemble the packet to wait an inordinate amount of time to complete the task. The fragmentation identification numbers could also be duplicated very easily as there are only 16 bits in IPv4 so only 65536 packets are needed.
External ID Source Link Description
CAPEC-494 capec https://capec.mitre.org/data/definitions/494.html
CWE-770 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/770.html
CWE-404 cwe http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/404.html
REF-423 reference_from_CAPEC https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1858.txt Security Considerations - IP Fragment Filtering

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  1. This type of an attack requires the target system to be running a vulnerable implementation of IP, and the adversary needs to ability to send TCP packets of arbitrary size with crafted data.

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