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xfrm: Add file to document IPsec corner case

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Create Documentation/networking/ipsec.txt to document IPsec
corner issues and other info, which will be useful when user
deploying IPsec.

Signed-off-by: Fan Du <fan.du@windriver.com>
Signed-off-by: Steffen Klassert <steffen.klassert@secunet.com>
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Fan Du 2013-12-16 18:47:50 +08:00 committed by Steffen Klassert
parent 776e9dd90c
commit b3c6efbc36
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Documentation/networking/ipsec.txt Normal file
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Here documents known IPsec corner cases which need to be keep in mind when
deploy various IPsec configuration in real world production environment.
1. IPcomp: Small IP packet won't get compressed at sender, and failed on
policy check on receiver.
Quote from RFC3173:
2.2. Non-Expansion Policy
If the total size of a compressed payload and the IPComp header, as
defined in section 3, is not smaller than the size of the original
payload, the IP datagram MUST be sent in the original non-compressed
form. To clarify: If an IP datagram is sent non-compressed, no
IPComp header is added to the datagram. This policy ensures saving
the decompression processing cycles and avoiding incurring IP
datagram fragmentation when the expanded datagram is larger than the
MTU.
Small IP datagrams are likely to expand as a result of compression.
Therefore, a numeric threshold should be applied before compression,
where IP datagrams of size smaller than the threshold are sent in the
original form without attempting compression. The numeric threshold
is implementation dependent.
Current IPComp implementation is indeed by the book, while as in practice
when sending non-compressed packet to the peer(whether or not packet len
is smaller than the threshold or the compressed len is large than original
packet len), the packet is dropped when checking the policy as this packet
matches the selector but not coming from any XFRM layer, i.e., with no
security path. Such naked packet will not eventually make it to upper layer.
The result is much more wired to the user when ping peer with different
payload length.
One workaround is try to set "level use" for each policy if user observed
above scenario. The consequence of doing so is small packet(uncompressed)
will skip policy checking on receiver side.