satriapermana[dot]net

Many people advocate configuring packet filters with a mostly-closed policies that drop packets that they do not know to be safe. This leads to problems for users that are hard for them to diagnose while offering no additional security.

When a packet reaches the firewall, it is run against a set of rules. These rules may rely on existing state (eg. to match existing or related connections) or be stateless (eg. to match destination port 80). The rules determine an action to take for the packet, which can be one of:
:: ALLOW (aka ACCEPT)
Pemit a packet to traverse the firewall. This would be the behaviour if the firewall was not present.
:: REJECT
Prohibit a packet from passing. Send an ICMP destination-unreachable back to the source host [unless the icmp would not normally be permitted, eg. if it is to/from the broadcast address].
:: DROP (aka DENY, BLACKHOLE)
Prohibit a packet from passing. Send no response.

In the rules there is a choice of whether to REJECT or to DROP unwanted packets. When analysing this choice, we must consider negative and positive features for legitimate and illegitimate applications. The big difference between REJECT and DROP is that REJECT results in an ICMP error being returned.

Let’s consider the user first: Legitimate users
By REJECTing unknown packets, TCP aborts the connection and the application gets to know that the connection has failed after just one round-trip time. This allows the application attempting the connection to notify the user straight away. DROPping the packet will just cause TCP to retry the connection until the threshold for retranmission is exceeded. This should be at least 100 seconds. An experiment on Linux gives 0.01 seconds for a REJECT to give an application error from a TCP connection, but 189 seconds for DROP.

Now let’s consider hostile forces: Hostile users
A common reason for using DROP rather than REJECT is to avoid giving away information about which ports are open, however, discarding packets gives away exactly as much information as the rejection. With REJECT, you do your scan and categorise the results into “connection established” and “connection rejected”. With DROP, you categorise the results into “connection established” and “connection timed out”.

The most trivial scanner will use the operating system “connect” call and will wait until one connection attempt is completed before starting on the next. This type of scanner will be slowed down considerably by dropping packets. However, if the attack sets a timeout of 5 seconds per connection attempt, it is possible to scan every reserved port (1..1023) on a machine in just 1.5 hours. Scans are always automated, and an attacker doesn’t care that the result isn’t immediate.

A more sophisticated scanner will send packets itself rather than relying on the operating system’s TCP implementation. Such scanners are fast, efficient and indifferent to the choice of REJECT or DROP.

Hiding information about which ports are active requires making the server response indentical whether or not it offers a particular service. This is techically very difficult, and in some cases will be more error prone than actually providing the service!

Realistically, you could probably get away with accepting the connection for unknown ports, blackholing the data, then closing the connection after a timeout. However, that will cause problems with legitimate users if their application makes a connection to one of these ports.

Summary

Conclusion
DROP offers no effective barrier to hostile forces but can dramatically slow down applications run by legitimate users. DROP should not normally be used.