Internet Draft                                                  Y. Cheng
draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen-05.txt                                   J. Chu
Intended status: Experimental                           S. Radhakrishnan
Expiration date: February, 2014                                  A. Jain
                                                            Google, Inc.
                                                        October 14, 2013

                             TCP Fast Open

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Abstract




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   TCP Fast Open (TFO) allows data to be carried in the SYN and SYN-ACK
   packets and consumed by the receiving end during the initial
   connection handshake, thus saving up to one full round trip time
   (RTT) compared to the standard TCP, which requires a three-way
   handshake (3WHS) to complete before data can be exchanged. However
   TFO deviates from the standard TCP semantics; the data in the SYN
   could be replayed to an application in some rare circumstances.
   Applications should not use TFO unless they can tolerate this issue
   detailed in the Applicability section.

Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
   TFO refers to TCP Fast Open. Client refers to the TCP's active open
   side and server refers to the TCP's passive open side.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2. Data In SYN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     2.1 Relaxing TCP Semantics on Duplicated SYNs  . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.2. SYNs with Spoofed IP Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3. Protocol Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   4. Protocol Details  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     4.1. Fast Open Cookie  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.1.1. TCP Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.1.2. Server Cookie Handling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
       4.1.3. Client Cookie Handling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
     4.2. Fast Open Protocol  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
       4.2.1. Fast Open Cookie Request  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
       4.2.2. TCP Fast Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     5.1. Resource Exhaustion Attack by SYN Flood with Valid
          Cookies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
       5.1.1 Attacks from behind Shared Public IPs (NATs) . . . . . . 14
     5.2. Amplified Reflection Attack to Random Host  . . . . . . . . 15
   6. TFO's Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.1 Duplicate Data in SYNs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.2 Potential Performance Improvement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.3. Example: Web Clients and Servers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
       6.3.1. HTTP Request Replay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
       6.3.2. Speculative Connections by the Applications . . . . . . 17
       6.3.2. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
       6.3.3. Comparison with HTTP Persistent Connections . . . . . . 17
   7. Open Areas for Experimentation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     7.1. Performance impact due to middle-boxes and NAT  . . . . . . 18



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     7.2. Cookie-less Fast Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
   8. Related Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     8.1. T/TCP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     8.2. Common Defenses Against SYN Flood Attacks . . . . . . . . . 19
     8.3. TCP Cookie Transaction (TCPCT)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
   9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
   10. Acknowledgement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
   11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
     11.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
     11.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
   Appendix A. Example Socket API Changes to support TFO  . . . . . . 22
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23


1. Introduction


   TCP Fast Open (TFO) enables data to be exchanged safely during TCP's
   connection handshake. This document describes a design that enables
   applications to save a round trip while avoiding severe security
   ramifications. At the core of TFO is a security cookie used by the
   server side to authenticate a client initiating a TFO connection.
   This document covers the details of exchanging data during TCP's
   initial handshake, the protocol for TFO cookies, potential new
   security vulnerabilities and their mitigation, and the new socket
   API.

   TFO is motivated by the performance needs of today's Web
   applications. Current TCP only permits data exchange after 3WHS
   [RFC793], which adds one RTT to network latency. For short Web
   transfers this additional RTT is a significant portion of overall
   network latency, even when HTTP persistent connection is widely used.
   For example, the Chrome browser keeps TCP connections idle for up to
   5 minutes but 35% of Chrome HTTP requests are made on new TCP
   connections [RCCJR11]. For such Web and Web-like applications placing
   data in the SYN can yield significant latency improvements.  Next we
   describe how we resolve the challenges that arise upon doing so.

2. Data In SYN

   Standard TCP already allows data to be carried in SYN packets
   ([RFC793], section 3.4) but forbids the receiver from delivering it
   to the application until 3WHS is completed. This is because TCP's
   initial handshake serves to capture old or duplicate SYNs.

   To enable applications exchange data in TCP handshake, TFO removes
   the constraint and allows data in SYN packets to be delivered to
   application. This change of TCP semantic raises two issues discussed



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   in the following subsections, making TFO unsuitable for certain
   applications.

   Therefore TCP implementations MUST NOT use TFO by default, but only
   use TFO if requested explicitly by the application on a per service
   port basis. Applications need to evaluate TFO applicability described
   in Section 6 before using TFO.

2.1 Relaxing TCP Semantics on Duplicated SYNs

   TFO allows data to be delivered to the application before 3WHS  is
   completed, thus opening itself to a data integrity issue in either of
   the two cases below:

   a) the receiver host receives data in a duplicate SYN after it has
   forgotten it received the original SYN (e.g. due to a reboot);

   b) the duplicate is received after the connection created by the
   original SYN has been closed and the close was initiated by the
   sender (so the receiver will not be protected by the 2MSL TIMEWAIT
   state).

   The now obsoleted T/TCP [RFC1644] attempted to address these issues.
   It is not successful and not deployed due to various vulnerabilities
   as described in the Related Work section. Rather than trying to
   capture all dubious SYN packets to make TFO 100% compatible with TCP
   semantics, we made a design decision early on to accept old SYN
   packets with data, i.e., to restrict TFO use to a class of
   applications (Section 6) that are tolerant of duplicate SYN packets
   with data. We believe this is the right design trade-off balancing
   complexity with usefulness.

2.2. SYNs with Spoofed IP Addresses

   Standard TCP suffers from the SYN flood attack [RFC4987] because SYN
   packets with spoofed source IP addresses can easily fill up a
   listener's small queue, causing a service port to be blocked
   completely until timeouts.

   TFO goes one step further to allow server-side TCP to send up data to
   the application layer before 3WHS is completed. This opens up serious
   new vulnerabilities. Applications serving ports that have TFO enabled
   may waste lots of CPU and memory resources processing the requests
   and producing the responses. If the response is much larger than the
   request, the attacker can further mount an amplified reflection
   attack against victims of choice beyond the TFO server itself.

   Numerous mitigation techniques against regular SYN flood attacks



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   exist and have been well documented [RFC4987]. Unfortunately none are
   applicable to TFO. We propose a server-supplied cookie to mitigate
   these new vulnerabilities in the next Section and evaluate the
   effectiveness of the defense in Section 7.

3. Protocol Overview

   The key component of TFO is the Fast Open Cookie (cookie), a message
   authentication code (MAC) tag generated by the server. The client
   requests a cookie in one regular TCP connection, then uses it for
   future TCP connections to exchange data during 3WHS:

   Requesting a Fast Open Cookie:

   1. The client sends a SYN with a Fast Open Cookie Request option.

   2. The server generates a cookie and sends it through the Fast Open
      Cookie option of a SYN-ACK packet.

   3. The client caches the cookie for future TCP Fast Open connections
      (see below).

   Performing TCP Fast Open:

   1. The client sends a SYN with Fast Open Cookie option and data.

   2. The server validates the cookie:
      a. If the cookie is valid, the server sends a SYN-ACK
         acknowledging both the SYN and the data. The server then
         delivers the data to the application.

      b. Otherwise, the server drops the data and sends a SYN-ACK
         acknowledging only the SYN sequence number.

   3. If the server accepts the data in the SYN packet, it may send the
      response data before the handshake finishes. The max amount is
      governed by the TCP's congestion control [RFC5681].

   4. The client sends an ACK acknowledging the SYN and the server data.
      If the client's data is not acknowledged, the client retransmits
      the data in the ACK packet.

   5. The rest of the connection proceeds like a normal TCP connection.
      The client can repeat many Fast Open operations once it acquires a
      cookie (until the cookie is expired by the server). Thus TFO is
      useful for applications that have temporal locality on client and
      server connections.




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   Requesting Fast Open Cookie in connection 1:

      TCP A (Client)                                    TCP B(Server)
      ______________                                    _____________
      CLOSED                                                   LISTEN

   #1 SYN-SENT       ----- <SYN,CookieOpt=NIL>  ---------->  SYN-RCVD

   #2 ESTABLISHED    <---- <SYN,ACK,CookieOpt=C> ----------  SYN-RCVD
       (caches cookie C)

   Performing TCP Fast Open in connection 2:

      TCP A (Client)                                    TCP B(Server)
      ______________                                    _____________
      CLOSED                                                   LISTEN

   #1 SYN-SENT       ----- <SYN=x,CookieOpt=C,DATA_A> ---->  SYN-RCVD

   #2 ESTABLISHED    <---- <SYN=y,ACK=x+len(DATA_A)+1> ----  SYN-RCVD

   #3 ESTABLISHED    <---- <ACK=x+len(DATA_A)+1,DATA_B>----  SYN-RCVD

   #4 ESTABLISHED    ----- <ACK=y+1>--------------------> ESTABLISHED

   #5 ESTABLISHED    --- <ACK=y+len(DATA_B)+1>----------> ESTABLISHED

























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4. Protocol Details

4.1. Fast Open Cookie

   The Fast Open Cookie is designed to mitigate new security
   vulnerabilities in order to enable data exchange during handshake.
   The cookie is a message authentication code tag generated by the
   server and is opaque to the client; the client simply caches the
   cookie and passes it back on subsequent SYN packets to open new
   connections. The server can expire the cookie at any time to enhance
   security.

4.1.1. TCP Options

   Fast Open Cookie Option

   The server uses this option to grant a cookie to the client in the
   SYN-ACK packet; the client uses it to pass the cookie back to the
   server in subsequent SYN packets.

                                   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
                                   |      Kind     |    Length     |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                                                               |
   ~                            Cookie                             ~
   |                                                               |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Kind            1 byte: constant TBD (assigned by IANA)
   Length          1 byte: range 6 to 18 (bytes); limited by
                           remaining space in the options field.
                           The number MUST be even.
   Cookie          4 to 16 bytes (Length - 2)
   Options with invalid Length values or without SYN flag set MUST be
   ignored.  The minimum Cookie size is 4 bytes. Although the diagram
   shows a cookie aligned on 32-bit boundaries, alignment is not
   required.

   Fast Open Cookie Request Option

   The client uses this option in the SYN packet to request a cookie
   from a TFO-enabled server
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |      Kind     |    Length     |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Kind            1 byte: same as the Fast Open Cookie option
   Length          1 byte: constant 2. This distinguishes the option



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                           from the Fast Open cookie option.
   Options with invalid Length values, without SYN flag set, or with ACK
   flag set MUST be ignored.

4.1.2. Server Cookie Handling

   The server is in charge of cookie generation and authentication. The
   cookie SHOULD be a message authentication code tag with the following
   properties:
   1. The cookie authenticates the client's (source) IP address of the
      SYN packet. The IP address may be an IPv4 or IPv6 address.

   2. The cookie can only be generated by the server and can not be
      fabricated by any other parties including the client.

   3. The generation and verification are fast relative to the rest of
      SYN and SYN-ACK processing.

   4. A server may encode other information in the cookie, and accept
      more than one valid cookie per client at any given time. But this
      is all server implementation dependent and transparent to the
      client.

   5. The cookie expires after a certain amount of time. The reason for
      cookie expiration is detailed in the "Security Consideration"
      section. This can be done by either periodically changing the
      server key used to generate cookies or including a timestamp when
      generating the cookie.

      To gradually invalidate cookies over time, the server can
      implement key rotation to generate and verify cookies using
      multiple keys. This approach is useful for large-scale servers to
      retain Fast Open rolling key updates. We do not specify a
      particular mechanism because the implementation is server
      specific.

   The server supports the cookie generation and verification
   operations:

   - GetCookie(IP_Address): returns a (new) cookie

   - IsCookieValid(IP_Address, Cookie): checks if the cookie is valid,
   i.e., it has not expired and it authenticates the client IP address.

   Example Implementation: a simple implementation is to use AES_128 to
   encrypt the IPv4 (with padding) or IPv6 address and truncate to 64
   bits. The server can periodically update the key to expire the
   cookies. AES encryption on recent processors is fast and takes only a



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   few hundred nanoseconds [RCCJR11].

   If only one valid cookie is allowed per-IP and the server can
   regenerate the cookie independently, the best validation process is
   to simply regenerate a valid cookie and compare it against the
   incoming cookie. In that case if the incoming cookie fails the check,
   a valid cookie is readily available to be sent to the client.

4.1.3. Client Cookie Handling

   The client MUST cache cookies from servers for later Fast Open
   connections. For a multi-homed client, the cookies are both client
   and server IP dependent. Beside the cookie, we RECOMMEND that the
   client caches the MSS and RTT to the server to enhance performance.

   The MSS advertised by the server is stored in the cache to determine
   the maximum amount of data that can be supported in the SYN packet.
   This information is needed because data is sent before the server
   announces its MSS in the SYN-ACK packet. Without this information,
   the data size in the SYN packet is limited to the default MSS of 536
   bytes [RFC1122]. The client SHOULD update the cache MSS value
   whenever it discovers new MSS value, e.g., through path MTU
   discovery.

   Caching RTT allows seeding a more accurate SYN timeout than the
   default value [RFC6298]. This lowers the performance penalty if the
   network or the server drops the SYN packets with data or the cookie
   options.

   The cache replacement algorithm is not specified and is left to the
   implementations.

   Note that before TFO sees wide deployment, clients SHOULD cache
   negative responses from servers in order to reduce the amount of
   futile TFO attempts. Since TFO is enabled on a per-service port basis
   but cookies are independent of service ports, clients' cache should
   include remote port numbers too.

4.2. Fast Open Protocol

   One predominant requirement of TFO is to be fully compatible with
   existing TCP implementations, both on the client and the server
   sides.

   The server keeps two variables per listening port:

   FastOpenEnabled: default is off. It MUST be turned on explicitly by
   the application. When this flag is off, the server does not perform



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   any TFO related operations and MUST ignore all cookie options.

   PendingFastOpenRequests: tracks number of TFO connections in SYN-RCVD
   state.  If this variable goes over a preset system limit, the server
   SHOULD disable TFO for all new connection requests until
   PendingFastOpenRequests drops below the system limit. This variable
   is used for defending some vulnerabilities discussed in the "Security
   Considerations" section.

   The server keeps a FastOpened flag per TCB to mark if a connection
   has successfully performed a TFO.

4.2.1. Fast Open Cookie Request

   Any client attempting TFO MUST first request a cookie from the server
   with the following steps:

   1. The client sends a SYN packet with a Fast Open Cookie Request
      option.

   2. The server SHOULD respond with a SYN-ACK based on the procedures
      in the "Server Cookie Handling" section. This SYN-ACK SHOULD
      contain a Fast Open Cookie option if the server currently supports
      TFO for this listener port.

   3. If the SYN-ACK contains a Fast Open Cookie option, the client
      replaces the cookie and other information as described in the
      "Client Cookie Handling" section. Otherwise, if the SYN-ACK is
      first seen, i.e.,not a (spurious) retransmission, the client MAY
      remove the server information from the cookie cache. If the SYN-
      ACK is a spurious retransmission without valid Fast Open Cookie
      Option, the client does nothing to the cookie cache for the
      reasons below.

   The network or servers may drop the SYN or SYN-ACK packets with the
   new cookie options, which will cause SYN or SYN-ACK timeouts. We
   RECOMMEND both the client and the server to retransmit SYN and SYN-
   ACK without the cookie options on timeouts. This ensures the
   connections of cookie requests will go through and lowers the latency
   penalty (of dropped SYN/SYN-ACK packets). The obvious downside for
   maximum compatibility is that any regular SYN drop will fail the
   cookie (although one can argue the delay in the data transmission
   till after 3WHS is justified if the SYN drop is due to network
   congestion).  Next section describes a heuristic to detect such drops
   when the client receives the SYN-ACK.

   We also RECOMMEND the client to record servers that failed to respond
   to cookie requests and only attempt another cookie request after



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   certain period. An alternate proposal is to request cookie in FIN
   instead since FIN-drop by incompatible middle-box does not affect
   latency. However such paths are likely to drop SYN packet with data
   later, and many applications close the connections with RST instead,
   so the actual benefit of this approach is not clear.

4.2.2. TCP Fast Open

   Once the client obtains the cookie from the target server, it can
   perform subsequent TFO connections until the cookie is expired by the
   server.

   Client: Sending SYN

   To open a TFO connection, the client MUST have obtained a cookie from
   the server:

   1. Send a SYN packet.

      a. If the SYN packet does not have enough option space for the
      Fast Open Cookie option, abort TFO and fall back to regular 3WHS.

      b. Otherwise, include the Fast Open Cookie option with the cookie
      of the server. Include any data up to the cached server MSS or
      default 536 bytes.

   2. Advance to SYN-SENT state and update SND.NXT to include the data
      accordingly.

   3. If RTT is available from the cache, seed SYN timer according to
      [RFC6298].

   To deal with network or servers dropping SYN packets with payload or
   unknown options, when the SYN timer fires, the client SHOULD
   retransmit a SYN packet without data and Fast Open Cookie options.

   Server: Receiving SYN and responding with SYN-ACK

   Upon receiving the SYN packet with Fast Open Cookie option:

   1. Initialize and reset a local FastOpened flag. If FastOpenEnabled
      is false, go to step 5.

   2. If PendingFastOpenRequests is over the system limit, go to step 5.

   3. If IsCookieValid() in section 4.1.2 returns false, go to step 5.

   4. Buffer the data and notify the application. Set FastOpened flag



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      and increment PendingFastOpenRequests.

   5. Send the SYN-ACK packet. The packet MAY include a Fast Open
      Option. If FastOpened flag is set, the packet acknowledges the SYN
      and data sequence. Otherwise it acknowledges only the SYN
      sequence. The server MAY include data in the SYN-ACK packet if the
      response data is readily available. Some application may favor
      delaying the SYN-ACK, allowing the application to process the
      request in order to produce a response, but this is left up to the
      implementation.

   6. Advance to the SYN-RCVD state. If the FastOpened flag is set, the
      server MUST follow the congestion control [RFC5681], in particular
      the initial congestion window [RFC3390], to send more data
      packets.

      Note that if SYN-ACK is lost, regular TCP reduces the initial
      congestion window before sending any data. In this case TFO is
      slightly more aggressive in the first data round trip even though
      it does not change the congestion control.

   If the SYN-ACK timer fires, the server SHOULD retransmit a SYN-ACK
   segment with neither data nor Fast Open Cookie options for
   compatibility reasons.

   A special case is simultaneous open where the SYN receiver is a
   client in SYN-SENT state. The protocol remains the same because
   [RFC793] already supports both data in SYN and simultaneous open. But
   the client's socket may have data available to read before it's
   connected. This document does not cover the corresponding API change.

   Client: Receiving SYN-ACK

   The client SHOULD perform the following steps upon receiving the SYN-
   ACK:

   1. Update the cookie cache if the SYN-ACK has a Fast Open Cookie
      Option or MSS option or both.

   2. Send an ACK packet. Set acknowledgment number to RCV.NXT and
      include the data after SND.UNA if data is available.

   3. Advance to the ESTABLISHED state.

   Note there is no latency penalty if the server does not acknowledge
   the data in the original SYN packet. The client SHOULD retransmit any
   unacknowledged data in the first ACK packet in step 2. The data
   exchange will start after the handshake like a regular TCP



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   connection.

   If the client has timed out and retransmitted only regular SYN
   packets, it can heuristically detect paths that intentionally drop
   SYN with Fast Open option or data. If the SYN-ACK acknowledges only
   the initial sequence and does not carry a Fast Open cookie option,
   presumably it is triggered by a retransmitted (regular) SYN and the
   original SYN or the corresponding SYN-ACK was lost.

   Server: Receiving ACK

   Upon receiving an ACK acknowledging the SYN sequence, the server
   decrements PendingFastOpenRequests and advances to the ESTABLISHED
   state. No special handling is required further.

5. Security Considerations

   The Fast Open cookie stops an attacker from trivially flooding
   spoofed SYN packets with data to burn server resources or to mount an
   amplified reflection attack on random hosts. The server can defend
   against spoofed SYN floods with invalid cookies using existing
   techniques [RFC4987]. We note that although generating bogus cookies
   is cost-free, the cost of validating the cookies, inherent to any
   authentication scheme, may not be substantial compared to processing
   a regular SYN packet.

5.1. Resource Exhaustion Attack by SYN Flood with Valid Cookies

   However, the attacker may still obtain cookies from some compromised
   hosts, then flood spoofed SYN with data and "valid" cookies (from
   these hosts or other vantage points). With DHCP, it's possible to
   obtain cookies of past IP addresses without compromising any host.
   Below we identify new vulnerabilities of TFO and describe the
   countermeasures.

   Like regular TCP handshakes, TFO is vulnerable to such an attack. But
   the potential damage can be much more severe. Besides causing
   temporary disruption to service ports under attack, it may exhaust
   server CPU and memory resources. Such an attack will show up on
   application server logs as a application level DoS from Bot-nets,
   triggering other defenses and alerts.

   For this reason it is crucial for the TFO server to limit the maximum
   number of total pending TFO connection requests, i.e.,
   PendingFastOpenRequests. When the limit is exceeded, the server
   temporarily disables TFO entirely as described in "Server Cookie
   Handling". Then subsequent TFO requests will be downgraded to regular
   connection requests, i.e., with the data dropped and only SYN



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   acknowledged. This allows regular SYN flood defense techniques
   [RFC4987] like SYN-cookies to kick in and prevent further service
   disruption.

   The main impact of SYN floods against the standard TCP stack is not
   directly from the floods themselves costing TCP processing overhead
   or host memory, but rather from the spoofed SYN packets filling up
   the often small listener's queue.

   On the other hand, TFO SYN floods can cause damage directly if
   admitted without limit into the stack. The RST packets from the
   spoofed host will fuel rather than defeat the SYN floods as compared
   to the non-TFO case, because the attacker can flood more SYNs with
   data to cost more data processing resources. For this reason, a TFO
   server needs to monitor the connections in SYN-RCVD being reset in
   addition to imposing a reasonable max queue length. Implementations
   may combine the two, e.g., by continuing to account for those
   connection requests that have just been reset against the listener's
   PendingFastOpenRequests until a timeout period has passed.

   Limiting the maximum number of pending TFO connection requests does
   make it easy for an attacker to overflow the queue, causing TFO to be
   disabled. We argue that causing TFO to be disabled is unlikely to be
   of interest to attackers because the service will remain intact
   without TFO hence there is hardly any real damage.

5.1.1 Attacks from behind Shared Public IPs (NATs)

   An attacker behind NAT can easily obtain valid cookies to launch the
   above attack to hurt other clients that share the path. [BRISCOE12]
   suggested that the server can extend cookie generation to include the
   TCP timestamp---GetCookie(IP_Address, Timestamp)---and implement it
   by  encrypting the concatenation of the two values to generate the
   cookie. The client stores both the cookie and its corresponding
   timestamp, and echoes both in the SYN.  The server then implements
   IsCookieValid(IP_Address, Timestamp, Cookie) by encrypting the IP and
   timestamp data and comparing it with the cookie value.

   This enables the server to issue different cookies to clients that
   share the same IP address, hence can selectively discard those
   misused cookies from the attacker. However the attacker can simply
   repeat the attack with new cookies. The server would eventually need
   to throttle all requests from the IP address just like the current
   approach. Moreover this approach requires modifying [RFC 1323] to
   send non-zero Timestamp Echo Reply in SYN, potentially cause firewall
   issues. Therefore we believe the benefit does not outweigh the
   drawbacks.




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5.2. Amplified Reflection Attack to Random Host

   Limiting PendingFastOpenRequests with a system limit can be done
   without Fast Open Cookies and would protect the server from resource
   exhaustion. It would also limit how much damage an attacker can cause
   through an amplified reflection attack from that server. However, it
   would still be vulnerable to an amplified reflection attack from a
   large number of servers. An attacker can easily cause damage by
   tricking many servers to respond with data packets at once to any
   spoofed victim IP address of choice.

   With the use of Fast Open Cookies, the attacker would first have to
   steal a valid cookie from its target victim. This likely requires the
   attacker to compromise the victim host or network first.

   The attacker here has little interest in mounting an attack on the
   victim host that has already been compromised. But it may be
   motivated to disrupt the victim's network. Since a stolen cookie is
   only valid for a single server, it has to steal valid cookies from a
   large number of servers and use them before they expire to cause
   sufficient damage without triggering the defense.

   One can argue that if the attacker has compromised the target network
   or hosts, it could perform a similar but simpler attack by injecting
   bits directly. The degree of damage will be identical, but TFO-
   specific attack allows the attacker to remain anonymous and disguises
   the attack as from other servers.

   The best defense is for the server not to respond with data until
   handshake finishes. In this case the risk of amplification reflection
   attack is completely eliminated. But the potential latency saving
   from TFO may diminish if the server application produces responses
   earlier before the handshake completes.


















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6. TFO's Applicability

   This section is to help applications considering TFO to evaluate
   TFO's benefits and drawbacks using the Web client and server
   applications as an example throughout. Applications here refer
   specifically to the process that writes data into the socket, i.e., a
   java script process that sends data to the server. A proposed socket
   API change is in the Appendix.

6.1 Duplicate Data in SYNs

   It is possible, though uncommon, that using TFO results in the first
   data written to a socket to be delivered more than once to the
   application on the remote host(Section 2.1). This replay potential
   only applies to data in the SYN but not subsequent data exchanges.
   The client MUST NOT use TFO to send data in the SYN, and the server
   MUST NOT accept data in the SYN if it cannot handle receiving the
   same SYN data more than once, due to reasons described before.

6.2 Potential Performance Improvement

   TFO is designed for latency-conscious applications that are sensitive
   to TCP's initial connection setup delay. To benefit from TFO, the
   first application data unit (e.g., an HTTP request) needs to be no
   more than TCP's maximum segment size (minus options used in SYN).
   Otherwise the remote server can only process the client's application
   data unit once the rest of it is delivered after the initial
   handshake, diminishing TFO's benefit.

   To the extent possible, applications SHOULD reuse the connection to
   take advantage of TCP's built-in congestion control and reduce
   connection setup overhead. An application that employs too many
   short-lived connections will negatively impact network stability, as
   these connections often exit before TCP's congestion control
   algorithm takes effect.

6.3. Example: Web Clients and Servers

6.3.1. HTTP Request Replay

   While TFO is motivated by Web applications, the browser should not
   use TFO to send requests in SYNs if those requests cannot tolerate
   replays. One example is POST requests without application-layer
   transaction protection (e.g., a unique identifier in the request
   header).

   On the other hand, TFO is particularly useful for GET requests.
   Although not all GET requests are idempotent, GETs are frequently



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   replayed today across striped TCP connections: after a server
   receives an HTTP request but before the ACKs of the requests reach
   the browser, the browser may timeout and retry the same request on
   another (possibly new) TCP connection. This differs from a TFO replay
   only in that the replay is initiated by the browser, not by the TCP
   stack.

6.3.2. Speculative Connections by the Applications

   Some Web browsers maintain a history of the domains for frequently
   visited web pages. The browsers then speculatively pre-open TCP
   connections to these domains before the user initiates any requests
   for them [BELSHE11]. While this technique also saves the handshake
   latency, it wastes server and network resources by initiating and
   maintaining idle connections.

6.3.2. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS)

   For TLS over TCP, it is safe and useful to include TLS CLIENT_HELLO
   in the SYN packet to save 1-RTT in TLS handshake. There is no concern
   about violating idempotency. In particular it can be used alone with
   the speculative connection above. While HTTPS adoption is still low,
   it will increase over time (especially given the context of recent
   revelations). Thus the potential importance of TCP Fast Open in
   decreasing user perceived latency in HTTPS.

6.3.3. Comparison with HTTP Persistent Connections

   Is TFO useful given the wide deployment of HTTP persistent
   connections? The short answer is yes.  Studies [RCCJR11][AERG11] show
   that the average number of transactions per connection is between 2
   and 4, based on large-scale measurements from both servers and
   clients. In these studies, the servers and clients both kept idle
   connections up to several minutes, well into "human think" time.

   Keeping connections open and idle even longer risks a greater
   performance penalty. [HNESSK10][MQXMZ11] show that the majority of
   home routers and ISPs fail to meet the the 124-minute idle timeout
   mandated in [RFC5382].  In [MQXMZ11], 35% of mobile ISPs silently
   timeout idle connections within 30 minutes. End hosts, unaware of
   silent middle-box timeouts, suffer multi-minute TCP timeouts upon
   using those long-idle connections.

   To circumvent this problem, some applications send frequent TCP keep-
   alive probes.  However, this technique drains power on mobile devices
   [MQXMZ11]. In fact, power has become such a prominent issue in modern
   LTE devices that mobile browsers close HTTP connections within
   seconds or even immediately [SOUDERS11].



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   [RCCJR11] studied Chrome browser performance based on 28 days of
   global statistics. The Chrome browser keeps idle HTTP persistent
   connections for 5 to 10 minutes. However the average number of the
   transactions per connection is only 3.3 and TCP 3WHS accounts for up
   to 25% of the HTTP transaction network latency. The authors estimated
   that TFO TFO improves page load time by 10% to 40% on selected
   popular Web sites.

7. Open Areas for Experimentation

   We now outline some areas that need experimentation in the Internet
   and under different network scenarios.  These experiments should help
   the community evaluate Fast Open benefits and risks towards further
   standardization and implementation of Fast Open and its related
   protocols.

7.1. Performance impact due to middle-boxes and NAT

   [MAF04] found that some middle-boxes and end-hosts may drop packets
   with unknown TCP options. Studies [LANGLEY06, HNRGHT11] both found
   that 6% of the probed paths on the Internet drop SYN packets with
   data or with unknown TCP options. The TFO protocol deals with this
   problem by falling back to regular TCP handshake and re-transmitting
   SYN without data or cookie options after the initial SYN timeout.
   Moreover the implementation is recommended to negatively cache such
   incidents to avoid recurring timeouts.  Further study is required to
   evaluate the performance impact of these malicious drop behaviors.

   Another interesting study is the (loss of) TFO performance benefit
   behind certain carrier-grade NAT. Typically hosts behind a NAT
   sharing the same IP address will get the same cookie for the same
   server. This will not prevent TFO from working. But on some carrier-
   grade NAT configurations where every new TCP connection from the same
   physical host uses a different public IP address, TFO does not
   provide latency benefits. However, there is no performance penalty
   either, as described in Section "Client: Receiving SYN-ACK".

7.2. Cookie-less Fast Open

   The cookie mechanism mitigates resource exhaustion and amplification
   attacks. However cookies are not necessary if the server has
   application-level protection or is immune to these attacks. For
   example a Web server that only replies with a simple HTTP redirect
   response that fits in the SYN-ACK packet may not care about resource
   exhaustion. Such an application can safely disable TFO cookie checks.

   Disabling cookies simplifies both the client and the server, as the
   client no longer needs to request a cookie and the server no longer



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   needs to check or generate cookies.  Disabling cookies also
   potentially simplifies configuration, as the server no longer needs a
   key. It may be preferable to enable SYN cookies and disable TFO
   [RFC4987] when a server is overloaded by a large-scale Bot-net
   attack.

   Careful experimentation is necessary to evaluate if cookie-less TFO
   is practical. The implementation can provide an experimental feature
   to allow zero length, or null, cookies as opposed to the minimum 4
   bytes cookies. Thus the server may return a null cookie and the
   client will send data in SYN with it subsequently. If the server
   believes it's under a DoS attack through other defense mechanisms, it
   can switch to regular Fast Open for listener sockets.

8. Related Work

8.1. T/TCP

   TCP Extensions for Transactions [RFC1644] attempted to bypass the
   three-way handshake, among other things, hence shared the same goal
   but also the same set of issues as TFO. It focused most of its effort
   battling old or duplicate SYNs, but paid no attention to security
   vulnerabilities it introduced when bypassing 3WHS [PHRACK98].

   As stated earlier, we take a practical approach to focus TFO on the
   security aspect, while allowing old, duplicate SYN packets with data
   after recognizing that 100% TCP semantics is likely infeasible. We
   believe this approach strikes the right tradeoff, and makes TFO much
   simpler and more appealing to TCP implementers and users.

8.2. Common Defenses Against SYN Flood Attacks

   [RFC4987] studies on mitigating attacks from regular SYN flood, i.e.,
   SYN without data . But from the stateless SYN-cookies to the stateful
   SYN Cache, none can preserve data sent with SYN safely while still
   providing an effective defense.

   The best defense may be to simply disable TFO when a host is
   suspected to be under a SYN flood attack, e.g., the SYN backlog is
   filled. Once TFO is disabled, normal SYN flood defenses can be
   applied. The "Security Consideration" section contains a thorough
   discussion on this topic.

8.3. TCP Cookie Transaction (TCPCT)

   TCPCT [RFC6013] eliminates server state during initial handshake and
   defends spoofing DoS attacks. Like TFO, TCPCT allows SYN and SYN-ACK
   packets to carry data. But the server can only send up to MSS bytes



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   of data during the handshake instead of the initial congestion window
   unlike TFO. Therefore applications like Web may not receive the
   latency benefit as TFO.


9. IANA Considerations

   The Fast Open Cookie Option and Fast Open Cookie Request Option
   define no new namespace. The options require IANA to allocate one
   value from the TCP option Kind namespace. Early implementation before
   the IANA allocation SHOULD follow [RFC6994] and use experimental
   option 254 and magic number 0xF989 (16 bits), then migrate to the new
   option after the allocation accordingly.

10. Acknowledgement

   We thank Rick Jones, Bob Briscoe, Adam Langley, Matt Mathis, Neal
   Cardwell, Roberto Peon, William Chan, Eric Dumazet, and Tom Herbert
   for their feedbacks. We especially thank Barath Raghavan for his
   contribution on the security design of Fast Open and proofreading
   this draft numerous times.

11. References

11.1. Normative References
   [RFC793]  Postel, J. "Transmission Control Protocol", RFC 793,
             September 1981.

   [RFC1122] Braden, R., Ed., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
             Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.

   [RFC5382] S. Guha, Ed., Biswas, K., Ford B., Sivakumar S., Srisuresh,
             P., "NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP", RFC 5382

   [RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V. and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
             Control", RFC 5681, September 2009.

   [RFC6298] Paxson, V., Allman, M., Chu, J. and M. Sargent, "Computing
             TCP's Retransmission Timer", RFC 6298, June 2011.

   [RFC6928] Chu, J., Dukkipati, N., Cheng, Y. and M. Mathis,
             "Increasing TCP's Initial Window", RFC 6928, April 2013.

   [RFC6994] Touch, Joe, "Shared Use of Experimental TCP Options",
             RFC 6694, August 2013.

11.2. Informative References




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   [AERG11]  M. Al-Fares, K. Elmeleegy, B. Reed, and I. Gashinsky,
             "Overclocking the Yahoo! CDN for Faster Web Page Loads". In
             Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference, November
             2011.

   [HNESSK10] S. Haetoenen, A. Nyrhinen, L. Eggert, S. Strowes, P.
             Sarolahti, M. Kojo., "An Experimental Study of Home Gateway
             Characteristics". In Proceedings of Internet Measurement
             Conference. Octobor 2010

   [HNRGHT11] M. Honda, Y. Nishida, C. Raiciu, A. Greenhalgh, M.
             Handley, H. Tokuda, "Is it Still Possible to Extend TCP?".
             In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference. November
             2011.

   [LANGLEY06] Langley, A, "Probing the viability of TCP extensions",
             URL http://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/ecntest.pdf

   [MAF04]   Medina, A., Allman, M., and S. Floyd, "Measuring
             Interactions Between Transport Protocols and Middleboxes",
             In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference, October
             2004.

   [MQXMZ11] Z. Mao, Z. Qian, Q. Xu, Z. Mao, M. Zhang. "An Untold Story
             of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks", In Proceedings of
             SIGCOMM. August 2011.

   [PHRACK98] "T/TCP vulnerabilities", Phrack Magazine, Volume 8, Issue
             53 artical 6. July 8, 1998. URL
             http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=53&id=6

   [QWGMSS11] F. Qian, Z. Wang, A. Gerber, Z. Mao, S. Sen, O.
             Spatscheck. "Profiling Resource Usage for Mobile
             Applications: A Cross-layer Approach", In Proceedings of
             International Conference on Mobile Systems. April 2011.

   [RCCJR11] Radhakrishnan, S., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Jain, A. and
             Raghavan, B., "TCP Fast Open". In Proceedings of 7th ACM
             CoNEXT Conference, December 2011.

   [RFC1644] Braden, R., "T/TCP -- TCP Extensions for Transactions
             Functional Specification", RFC 1644, July 1994.

   [RFC4987] Eddy, W., "TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common
             Mitigations", RFC 4987, August 2007.

   [RFC6013] Simpson, W., "TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT)", RFC6013,
             January 2011.



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   [SOUDERS11] S. Souders. "Making A Mobile Connection".
             http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/09/21/making-a-
             mobile-connection/

   [BRISCOE12] Briscoe, B., "Some ideas building on draft-ietf-tcpm-
               fastopen-01", tcpm list,
               http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/current/
               January 16, 2014msg07192.html

   [BELSHE12] Belshe, M., "The era of browser preconnect.",
              http://www.belshe.com/2011/02/10/
              the-era-of-browser-preconnect/

Appendix A. Example Socket API Changes to support TFO

   A.1 Active Open

   The active open side involves changing or replacing the connect()
   call, which does not take a user data buffer argument. We recommend
   replacing connect() call to minimize API changes and hence
   applications to reduce the deployment hurdle.

   One solution implemented in Linux 3.7 is introducing a new flag
   MSG_FASTOPEN for sendto() or sendmsg().  MSG_FASTOPEN marks the
   attempt to send data in SYN like a combination of connect() and
   sendto(), by performing an implicit connect() operation. It blocks
   until the handshake has completed and the data is buffered.

   For non-blocking socket it returns the number of bytes buffered and
   sent in the SYN packet. If the cookie is not available locally, it
   returns -1 with errno EINPROGRESS, and sends a SYN with TFO cookie
   request automatically. The caller needs to write the data again when
   the socket is connected. On errors, it returns the same errno as
   connect() if the handshake fails.

   An implementation may prefer not to change the sendmsg() because TFO
   is a TCP specific feature. A solution is to add a new socket option
   TCP_FASTOPEN for TCP sockets. When the option is enabled before a
   connect operation, sendmsg() or sendto() will perform Fast Open
   operation similar to the MSG_FASTOPEN flag described above. This
   approach however requires an extra setsockopt() system call.

   A.2 Passive Open

   The passive open side change is simpler compared to active open side.
   The application only needs to enable the reception of Fast Open
   requests via a new TCP_FASTOPEN setsockopt() socket option before
   listen().



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   The option enables Fast Open on the listener socket. The option value
   specifies the PendingFastOpenRequests threshold, i.e., the maximum
   length of pending SYNs with data payload. Once enabled, the TCP
   implementation will respond with TFO cookies per request.

   Traditionally accept() returns only after a socket is connected. But
   for a Fast Open connection, accept() returns upon receiving a SYN
   with a valid Fast Open cookie and data, and the data is available to
   be read through, e.g., recvmsg(), read().

Authors' Addresses

   Yuchung Cheng
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: ycheng@google.com

   Jerry Chu
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: hkchu@google.com

   Sivasankar Radhakrishnan
   Department of Computer Science and Engineering
   University of California, San Diego
   9500 Gilman Dr
   La Jolla, CA 92093-0404
   EMail: sivasankar@cs.ucsd.edu

   Arvind Jain
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: arvind@google.com















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