Introduction: IP Spoofing
Source: Suhas A Desai - Posted by Benjamin D. Thomas   
Features An article on "Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite" by S.M.Bellovin in 1989 initially explored IP Spoofing attacks . He described how Robert Morris, creator of the now infamous Internet Worm, figured out how TCP created sequence numbers and forged a TCP packet sequence.

This TCP packet included the destination address of his victim and using as IP spoofing attack Morris was able to obtain root access to his targeted system without a User ID or password.


IP spoofing is a technique used to gain unauthorized access to computers, whereby the attacker sends messages to a computer with a forging IP address indicating that the message is coming from a trusted host. There are a few variations on the types of attacks that using IP spoofing.

Spoofing Attacks:

1.non-blind spoofing

This attack takes place when the attacker is on the same subnet as the target that could see sequence and acknowledgement of packets. The threat of this type of spoofing is session hijacking and an attacker could bypass any authentication measures taken place to build the connection. This is accomplished by corrupting the DataStream of an established connection, then re-establishing it based on correct sequence and acknowledgement numbers with the attack machine.

2.Blind spoofing

This attack may take place from outside where sequence and acknowledgement numbers are unreachable. Attackers usually send several packets to the target machine in order to sample sequence numbers, which is doable in older days. Today, most OSs implement random sequence number generation, making it difficult to predict them accurately. If, however, the sequence number was compromised, data could be sent to the target.

3.Man in the Middle Attack

This is also called connection hijacking. In this attacks, a malicious party intercepts a legitimate communication between two hosts to controls the flow of communication and to eliminate or alter the information sent by one of the original participants without their knowledge. In this way, an attacker can fool a target into disclosing confidential information by spoofing the identity of the original sender or receiver. Connection hijacking exploits a "desynchronized state" in TCP communication. When the sequence number in a received packet is not the same as the expected sequence number, the connection is called "desynchronized." Depending on the actual value of the received sequence number, the TCP layer may either discard or buffer the packet. When two hosts are desynchronized enough, they will discard/ignore packets from each other. An attacker can then inject forged packets with the correct sequence numbers and potentially modify or add messages to the communication. This requires the attacker to be located on the communication path between the two hosts in order to replicate packets being sent. The key to this attack is creating the desynchronized state.

4.Denial of Service Attack

IP spoofing is almost always used in denial of service attacks (DoS), in which attackers are concerned with consuming bandwidth and resources by flooding the target with as many packets as possible in a short amount of time. To effectively conducting the attack, attackers spoof source IP addresses to make tracing and stopping the DoS as difficult as possible. When multiple compromised hosts are participating in the attack, all sending spoofed traffic, it is very challenging to quickly block the traffic.

Misconception of IP Spoofing:

A common misconception is that "IP Spoofing" can be used to hide your IP address while surfing the Internet, chatting on-line, sending e-mail, and so forth. This is generally not true. Forging the source IP address causes the responses to be misdirected, meaning you cannot create a normal network conncetion. However, IP spoofing is an integral part of many networks that do not need to see responses.

Detection of IP Spoofing:

We can monitor packets using network-monitoring software. A packet on an external interface that has both its source and destination IP addresses in the local domain is an indication of IP spoofing. Another way to detect IP spoofing is to compare the process accounting logs between systems on your internal network. If the IP spoofing attack has succeeded on one of your systems, you may get a log entry on the victim machine showing a remote access; on the apparent source machine, there will be no corresponding entry for initiating that remote access.

Prevention of IP Spoofing:

To prevent IP spoofing happen in your network, the following are some common practices:

· Avoid using the source address authentication. Implement cryptographic authentication system-wide.

· Configuring your network to reject packets from the Net that claim to originate from a local address.

· Implementing ingress and egress filtering on the border routers and implement an ACL (access control list) that blocks private IP addresses on your downstream interface.

If you allow outside connections from trusted hosts, enable encryption sessions at the router.

IP Fragment Attacks:

When packets are too large to be sent in a single IP packet, due to interface hardware limitations for example, an intermediate router can split them up unless prohibited by the Don't Fragment flag. IP fragmentation occurs when a router receives a packet larger than the MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) of the next network segment. All such fragments will have the same Identification field value, and the fragment offset indicates the position of the current fragment in the context of the pre-split up packet. Intermediate routers are not expected to re-assemble the fragments. The final destination will reassemble all the fragments of an IP packet and pass it to higher protocol layers like TCP or UDP.

Attackers create artificially fragmented packets in order to circumvent firewalls that do not perform packet reassembly. These only consider the properties of each individual fragment, and let the fragments through to final destination. One such attack involving fragments is known as the tiny fragment attack.

Two TCP fragments are created. The first fragment is so small that it does not even include the full TCP header, particularly the destination port number. The second fragment contains the remainder of the TCP header, including the port number. Another such type of malicious fragmentation involves fragments that have illegal fragment offsets.

A fragment offset value gives the index position of this fragment's data in a reassembled packet. The second fragment packet contains an offset value, which is less than the length of the data in the first packet. E.g..

If the first fragment was 24 bytes long, the second fragment may claim to have an offset of 20. Upon reassembly, the data in the second fragment overwrites the last four bytes of the data from the first fragment. If the unfragmented packet were TCP, then the first fragment would contain the TCP header overwriting the destination port number.

In the IP layer implementations of nearly all OS, there are bugs in the reassembly code. An attacker can create and send a pair of carefully crafted but malformed IP packets that in the process of reassembly cause a server to panic and crash. The receiving host attempts to reassemble such a packet, it calculates a negative length for the second fragment. This value is passed to a function (such as memcpy ()), which should do a copy from/ to memory, which takes the negative number to be an enormous unsigned (positive) number.

Another type of attack involves sending fragments that if reassembled will be an abnormally large packet, larger than the maximum permissible length for an IP packet. The attacker hopes that the receiving host will crash while attempting to reassemble the packet. The Ping of Death used this attack. It creates an ICMP echo request packet, which is larger than the maximum packet size of 65,535 bytes.

ICMP Smurfing

"Smurf" is the name of an automated program that attacks a network by exploiting IP broadcast addressing. Smurf and similar programs can cause the attacked part of a network to become "inoperable." Network nodes and their administrators to exchange information about the state of the network use ICMP.

A smurf program builds a network packet with a spoofed victim source address. The packet contains an ICMP ping message addressed to an IP broadcast address, meaning all IP addresses in a given network. If the routing device delivering traffic to those broadcast addresses performs the IP broadcast to layer 2 broadcast function, most hosts on that IP network will reply to it with an ICMP echo reply each. The echo responses to the ping message are sent back to the victim address. Enough pings and resultant echoes can flood the network making it unusable for real traffic.

A related attack is called "fraggle", simple re-write of smurf; uses UDP echo packets in the same fashion as the ICMP echo packets. The intermediary (broadcast) devices, and the spoofed victim are both hurt by this attack. The attackers rely on the ability to source spoofed packets to the "amplifiers" in order to generate the traffic which causes the denial of service.

In order to stop this, all networks should perform filtering either at the edge of the network where customers connect (access layer) or at the edge of the network with connections to the upstream providers, in order to defeat the possibility of source address spoofed packets from entering from downstream networks, or leaving for upstream networks.







About the Author:
Suhas A Desai

*Undergraduate Computer Engineering Student,Walchand CE,Sangli,INDIA.

*Previous Publications in area "Linux Based Biometrics Security with Smart Card" are include:ISA EXPO 2004,InTech Journal,TX,USA,IEEE Real Time and Embedded System symposium 2005,CA,USA.,e-Smart 2005,France.

*Writes security newsletters and features for many security sites.

Written by sreten on 2006-03-20 06:28:56
great article buddy!
niceWritten by abcde on 2009-03-13 08:21:04
nice article buddy!!!!!!!!!!

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