Re: Checksum at IP layer - is it even needed ?

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> On Dec 14, 2015, at 12:59 PM, Saku Ytti <saku@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 14 December 2015 at 17:38, Alexey Eromenko <al4321@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hey,
> 
>> * Slow-down of Core Routers.
> 
> Citation needed. I believe checksum and CRC are linerate and pretty
> much free in terms of pincount, transistor and thermal.

Yes, most hardware has offload in silicon for your desktop/wifi/ethernet
chipsets so the host doesn’t even do this.

>> Any advantages ?
>> * prevents single mis-routed packets, or a bad option from getting through.
> 
> Prevents packet mangling, if done right. If there is L3 CRC (not
> checksum, it's too weak) which excludes changing data (hop count) and
> specification mandates that it's not recalculated on egress, but
> ingress value is reused. Then it will guarantee that router or switch
> does not mangle the data.
> 
>> Quick result: besides ATM, everybody else seems to cover both headers
>> and all data.
> 
> Arbitrarily strong guarantee at L2 does not guarantee integrity at L3.
> Routers and switches (not fibres/copper!) mangle data and calculate
> correct L2 CRC on the broken data.
> I've unfortunately seen[0] this several times in real networks and I
> know other[1] networks who've seen it as well . I got lucky and was
> using IPv4, which made the error visible in egress LER's, had I been
> running IPv6 only, I would have never known that I'm mangling some
> packets.
> 
> [0] http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2014-January/063654.html
>     https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tsvwg/current/msg12457.html
> [1] http://www.evanjones.ca/tcp-and-ethernet-checksums-fail.html

I’ve also seen this mangling in production, specifically with an employee
with backhaul over wireless equipment that corrupted the body of
a packet triggering downstream application bugs, eg:

https://www.debian.org/security/2011/dsa-2276

This is not that common, but does occur.  I’ve also seen similar issues
in OTN hardware that is unhappy with ethernet frames of certain sizes.

- jared




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