"ISAKMP" flaws?

Paul Hoffman paul.hoffman at vpnc.org
Thu Nov 17 12:01:22 EST 2005


At 11:20 AM +0100 11/17/05, Florian Weimer wrote:
>These bugs have been uncovered by a PROTOS-style test suite.  Such
>test suites can only reveal missing checks for boundary conditions,
>leading to out-of-bounds array accesses and things like that.  In
>other words, trivial implementation errors which can be easily avoided
>using proper programming tools.

Which "proper programming tools" would check for a logic path failure 
when a crafted packet includes Subpacket A that is only supposed to 
be there when Subpacket B is there, but the packet doesn't include 
Subpacket B? There are no programming tools that check for this, or 
for related issues: it has to be the implementer who has enough 
understanding of the protocol and enough time (and program space) to 
code against such issues.

Throw in PKIX certificates in certificate chains, and it gets much worse.

IKE is a very complicated protocol with many within-packet and 
within-stream dependencies. These cannot be resolved by "proper 
programming tools" unless those tools are specifically crafted for 
IKE. SSL/TLS probably suffers the same fate.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com



More information about the cryptography mailing list