Internet DRAFT - draft-vyncke-v6ops-happy-eyeballs-cookie

draft-vyncke-v6ops-happy-eyeballs-cookie







IPv6 Operations                                                E. Vyncke
Internet-Draft                                                     Cisco
Intended status: Informational                             March 6, 2015
Expires: September 7, 2015


  HTTP State Management Mechanisms with Multiple Addresses User Agents
              draft-vyncke-v6ops-happy-eyeballs-cookie-01

Abstract

   HTTP servers usually save session states in their persistent storage
   indexed by session cookies generated by the HTTP servers.  It is up
   to the HTTP user-agent to send this session cookie on each HTTP
   request.  Some HTTP servers check whether the cookie is associated
   with the HTTP user-agent by the means of the user-agent IP address.
   Everything linking a state to an IP address (such as OAuth access
   code) to an IP address has the same issue.

   If the Happy Eyeball mechanism is used to select between IPv6 and
   IPv4, it may happen that while using the same HTTP server, some HTTP
   requests are done over IPv6 and the others over IPv4, which leads to
   two different sets of session states in the HTTP server.  This has
   the consequence of inconsistencies at the HTTP server.

   The only purpose of this document is to document this issue in more
   details than in section 8.2 of RFC 6883 including security
   considerations and mitigations.

   A similar problem arises with the use of non RFC 6888 compliant
   Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) devices used to access an IPv4-only HTTP
   server or HTTP user-agent using multi-homing.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
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   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."




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   This Internet-Draft will expire on September 7, 2015.

Copyright Notice

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   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  HTTP Session Management with HTTP Cookie  . . . . . . . . . .   2
     1.1.  Other Use of Session Cookies  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     1.2.  new section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   2.  Issues  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  Happy Eyeballs Issue  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.2.  Carrier-Grade NAT Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.3.  Multiple Interfaces Issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   3.  Mitigations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   6.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   7.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7

1.  HTTP Session Management with HTTP Cookie

   HTTP requests are basically stateless, therefore if a HTTP server
   requires to have some states associated to a HTTP user-agent (such as
   user name, login state, history, shopping basket, ...), there is a
   need to conserve those states.  This is usually done by using a HTTP
   cookie (see also RFC6265 [RFC6265]) identifying the session; also
   called "session state cookie".

   This session state cookie is generated by the HTTP server at the very
   first HTTP request from a HTTP user-agent.  The cookie is usually
   opaque (often a random number) and has no semantic except as being an
   index within the persistent storage of the HTTP server.  This index
   is used to access the complete state of the user-agent.  This
   mechanism is secure if the cookie is transferred with confidentiality



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   between the server and the user-agent.  If the cookie transfer and
   storage are not secured, then any hostile user-agent can reuse this
   cookie to access the full original session states (including shopping
   basket, payment details, ...); this attack is called 'session cookie
   stealing'.  This attack can happen if the HTTP traffic is intercepted
   by a man-in-the-middle attack but a good use of Transport Level
   Security RFC5246 [RFC5246] can prevent it.  The attack can also
   happen with some hostile scripting or other pieces of malware running
   on the user agent, that could copy and send the session cookie to the
   hostile user-agent; hence, it is not enough to use TLS to secure the
   session cookies.

   Some HTTP applications link the user-agent IP address (whether IPv6
   or IPv4) to the session state, probably for additional security
   checks in order to prevent session cookie stealing.  This link leads
   to some issues in a dual-stack world which are described in this
   document.

   The author knows about at least two large web sites having this
   problem.  It was so severe that those sites which were dual-stack had
   to move back to being IPv4-only... until the application and its
   security is updated.

1.1.  Other Use of Session Cookies

   Beside the use of session cookies by the HTTP server to keep states
   on the server, the very same cookie is also sometimes used by Server
   Load Balancing (SLB) mechanism to ensure that all HTTP requests from
   the same user-agent (even if behind a NAT) are always sent to the
   same physical HTTP server.  This is required if the server persistent
   storage is local to the server and is not shared by all the physical
   servers behind the SLB.

1.2.  new section

   Actually the problem is more generic than the session cookie,
   everything linking a state to an IP address has the same issue.  This
   includes OAuth [RFC6749] access tokens, bearer tokens, ... but also
   other mechanisms such as rate limiting per IP address or access
   control per IP address (for instance a captive portal for a guest
   net).

2.  Issues

   Similar issues can be caused by Happy Eyeball RFC6555 [RFC6555],
   Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) and having multiple interface or being multi-
   homed.




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2.1.  Happy Eyeballs Issue

   When a HTTP user-agent uses the Happy Eyeball mechanism to access a
   HTTP server, then, part of the HTTP requests can happen over IPv6 and
   another part over IPv4 if the latency between IPv4 and IPv6 varies
   quickly over time.  If there is a link between the session cookie and
   the user-agent IP address, then upon the first change of IP protocol
   version, the states associated to the cookie will be invalidated and
   will be deleted.  Here is an example:

   1.  User-agent with IPv4 address, ADDR4, connect to the server by
       using IPv4 because IPv6 is slower; the first request does not
       have any HTTP cookie;

   2.  Server generates a new cookie C4 and stores in its persistent
       storage that C4 is associated with address ADDR4;

   3.  User-agent continues his/her session using IPv4, on each new
       request the HTTP server receives the cookie C4 and checks that
       the user-agent address is indeed ADDR4;

   4.  Latency of IPv6 changes and becomes now faster than IPv4;

   5.  User-agent now uses its IPv6 address, ADDR6, to connect to the
       same server and continues to use the same cookie C4 as the server
       name is unchanged;

   6.  The server receives the HTTP request with the C4 cookie and
       checks whether C4 is associated with ADDR6 which is not the
       case... All session states are deleted and a new cookie, C6, is
       generated and associated to the IPV6 address ADDR6;

   7.  The end-user becomes frustrated because he/she has to restart
       his/her complete session from the beginning.

   This cookie invalidation may have some security benefit but it
   actually prevents a host using Happy Eyeballs to have a persistent
   session with a dual-stack HTTP server; with painful consequences for
   the user-experience: disconnection, loss of shopping basket, ...

2.2.  Carrier-Grade NAT Issue

   RFC6888 [RFC6888] describes the CGN requirements but not all CGN
   implement them.  Some CGN in the real world have a pool of IPv4
   addresses and do not always use the same public IPv4 address for all
   requests from a CGN client.  This obviously leads to the same problem
   as in section Section 2.1.  This will happen for IPv4-only HTTP
   servers.



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   Whether the CGN is used by IPv4 clients or by IPv6 clients (via NAT64
   RFC6146 [RFC6146])does not make any difference to the problem.  The
   use of the address family translation by MAP-T MAP-T
   [I-D.ietf-softwire-map-t] does not suffer from this issue for
   IPv4-only HTTP servers since one subscriber is restricted to several
   layer-4 ports from a single IPv4 address.

2.3.  Multiple Interfaces Issue

   When the HTTP user-agent has multiple interfaces, for example 3GPP
   and Wi-Fi, the preferred IP address depends on the WiFi or 3GPP
   availability.  In this case, a similar issue to Section 2.1 also
   happens as the session cookie can be linked first to the Wi-Fi IP
   address then when the user-agent looses its Wi-Fi connectivity the
   session cookie will be overwritten by a new session cookie linked to
   the 3GPP address.

   Whether the user-agent uses IPv4-only, IPv6-only or dual-stack has no
   impact on the issue.

3.  Mitigations

   The obvious mitigation for this issue is NOT to link any HTTP state
   management (including cookies) to any IP address of the HTTP user-
   agent at the risk of increasing the risk of "session cookie
   stealing".

   The author also believes that:

      Multipath TCP RFC6824 [RFC6824] hides completely the set of
      addresses of the client to the application.  Only the first
      subflow's IP addresses are exposed to the application, even if a
      later subflow uses a different address family; so, any session
      cookie will be permanently linked to the first IP address used by
      the HTTP user-agent;

      HTTP/2 [I-D.ietf-httpbis-http2] multiplexes multiple HTTP sessions
      over a single TCP connection, therefore, Happy Eyeball (or bad
      CGN) sees only one TCP connection and a change of IP address will
      never occur during the lifetime of this TCP connection.

4.  IANA Considerations

   This document contains no IANA considerations.







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5.  Security Considerations

   The association of the session cookie with the user-agent IP address
   has some security value as it can help prevent "session cookie
   stealing" in some limited situations; this benefit should be balanced
   with the lack of persistent session and the remaining vulnerability
   if the HTTP session can be intercepted by a man-in-the-middle attack.
   Moreover with more and more CGN being deployed, linked a session
   cookie to an IP address shared by hundreds of subscribers is less
   effective as the cookie could be reused by any subscribers using the
   same shared public IP address.

6.  Acknowledgements

   The author would like to thank Brian Carpenter, Ray Hunter, Jeroen
   Massar, Dan Metzler, Erik Nygren, Mark ZZZ Smith, Joe Touch, Dan Wing
   and Andrew Yourtchenko for some discussions on this topic.  Of
   course, RFC6883 [RFC6883] has already mentionned this issue without
   many details.

7.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-httpbis-http2]
              Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, "Hypertext Transfer
              Protocol version 2", draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-17 (work in
              progress), February 2015.

   [I-D.ietf-softwire-map-t]
              Li, X., Bao, C., Dec, W., Troan, O., Matsushima, S., and
              T. Murakami, "Mapping of Address and Port using
              Translation (MAP-T)", draft-ietf-softwire-map-t-08 (work
              in progress), December 2014.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.

   [RFC6146]  Bagnulo, M., Matthews, P., and I. van Beijnum, "Stateful
              NAT64: Network Address and Protocol Translation from IPv6
              Clients to IPv4 Servers", RFC 6146, April 2011.

   [RFC6265]  Barth, A., "HTTP State Management Mechanism", RFC 6265,
              April 2011.

   [RFC6555]  Wing, D. and A. Yourtchenko, "Happy Eyeballs: Success with
              Dual-Stack Hosts", RFC 6555, April 2012.

   [RFC6749]  Hardt, D., "The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework", RFC
              6749, October 2012.



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   [RFC6824]  Ford, A., Raiciu, C., Handley, M., and O. Bonaventure,
              "TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple
              Addresses", RFC 6824, January 2013.

   [RFC6883]  Carpenter, B. and S. Jiang, "IPv6 Guidance for Internet
              Content Providers and Application Service Providers", RFC
              6883, March 2013.

   [RFC6888]  Perreault, S., Yamagata, I., Miyakawa, S., Nakagawa, A.,
              and H. Ashida, "Common Requirements for Carrier-Grade NATs
              (CGNs)", BCP 127, RFC 6888, April 2013.

Author's Address

   Eric Vyncke
   Cisco
   De Kleetlaan 6a
   Diegem  1831
   Belgium

   Phone: +32 2 778 4677
   Email: evyncke@cisco.com





























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