Gregory Maxwell writes:
> I don't think "don't protect the headers" is an accurate description
> of Honolulu if it also leaves the system exposed to resets, as there
> clearly was a fair amount of concern expressed about spurious resets.

Even if we protected the headers, that would not automatically protect
against resets. Resets are hard to protect against, and for those we
most likely need something different than what can be done by the
protecting the header. 

> I'd like to reemphasize that any passive attacker infrastructure also
> trivially has the capability to inject a few packets-- just by having
> access to any non RPF filtered network connection anywhere in the
> world, without being a full scale man-in-the-middle.

Yes. And there is also difference in blind insertion attacks and
attacks where the attacker can see all the traffic. I.e. if attacker
can see port numbers, tcp sequence numbers etc, that can allow much
more efficient attacks, even when it cannot remove any packets from
the network. On the other hand attacker with that capability can also
quite easily do limited packet deletion attacks, for example
configuring firewall filtering rules in the intermediate devices, and
with those they can do targetted active attacks.

Anyways protection against prevasive monitoring is the important thing
here, the limited protection against active attacks is secondary
objective. If you want proper protection against active attacks, use
IPsec, TCP-AO or some other method that will provide that.
-- 
[email protected]

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