After debugging some connection problems I found that the wscale normalization concept is flawed. I’ll describe here what is wrong with it and then move on to suggest a different solution I’m currently testing. The problem I was seeing is that some connections to some webservers stalled without an apparent reason.

First a quick reminder of why I originally came up with the wscale normalization. Stream4 originally doesn’t look at the window scaling value when determining the TCP window. This causes it to be wrong about the TCP window in about every connection, which is one of the reasons out of window packets are not dropped (this is actually a gaping evasion hole since these packets are not used in stream reassembly). This is why I decided to add window scaling support to the stream4inline extension. This works great and allows the admin to drop out of window packets. There is a problem associated with it though. The maximal window that is possible with wscaling is 1GB. This would mean that Snort_inline would in the worst case have to queue almost 1GB of data in it’s buffers for a single stream. To prevent this being used by an attacker to attack Snort_inline, I wanted give the admin the option to set a maximal wscale size.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Inliniac authored by inliniac. Read the original post at: https://www.inliniac.net/blog/2007/09/04/window-scaling-normalization-in-snort_inline-broken-by-design/