What is the purpose of "RST" flag? - tcp

I scanned my metasploitable machine for open ports from Kali using Nmap and captured the traffic using Wireshark and noticed that for every SYN packet sent to an open port, a RST packet was sent as well. Why?

Read RFC 793 3.4 to learn more about reset packets. In your case, the explanation is :
1. If the connection does not exist (CLOSED) then a reset is sent
in response to any incoming segment except another reset. In
particular, SYNs addressed to a non-existent connection are rejected
by this means.

Related

TCP retransmission

I have an issue to receive a data from my sensor with TCP retransmission message.enter image description here
Any idea please?
enter image description here
The retransmissions that you are seeing are the SYN packet. This indicates that the server to which the packets are being sent is not responding at all.
If the server were responding, you would expect to see a SYN/ACK indicating that the connection attempt is being accepted or a RST/ACK indicating that the connection attempt is being rejected.
From what you have posted, I would look to see what the firewall rules look like on 192.168.0.39. I would expect to find that it is silently dropping inbound SYN packets on port 55838.

TCP checksum error for fragmented packets

I'm working on a server/client socket application that is using Linux TUN interface.
Server gets packets directly from TUN interface and pass them to clients and clients put received packets directly in the TUN interface.
<Server_TUN---><---Server---><---Clients---><---Client_TUN--->
Sometimes the packets from Server_TUN need to be fragmented in IP layer before transmitting to a client.
So at the server I read a packet from TUN, start fragmenting it in the IP layer and send them via socket to clients.
When the fragmentation logic was implemented, the solution did not work well.
After starting Wireshark on Client_TUN I noticed for all incoming fragmented packets I get TCP Checksum error.
At the given screenshot, frame number 154 is claimed to be reassembled in in 155.
But TCP checksum is claimed to be incorrect!
At server side, I keep tcp data intact and for the given example, while you see the reverse in Wireshark, I've split a packet with 1452 bytes (including IP header) and 30 bytes (Including IP header)
I've also checked the TCP checksum value at the server and its exactly is 0x935e and while I did not think that Checksum offloading matters for incoming packets, I checked offloading at the client and it was off.
$ sudo ethtool -k tun0 | grep ": on"
scatter-gather: on
tx-scatter-gather: on
tx-scatter-gather-fraglist: on
generic-segmentation-offload: on
generic-receive-offload: on
tx-vlan-offload: on
tx-vlan-stag-hw-insert: on
Despite that, because of the solution is not working now, I don't think its caused by offload effect.
Do you have any idea why TCP checksum could be incorrect for fragmented packets?
Hopefully I found the issue. It was my mistake. Some tcp data was missing when I was coping buffers. I was tracing on the indexes and lengths but because of the changes in data, checksum value was calculating differently in the client side.

TCP RST on TELNET - Packet builder

I'm having some troubles building my TCP RST packet. I've a LAN with 3 pc's connected, the host, victim and the attacker.
Im trying to break up the connection that exists between my Host and my Victim over a TELNET connection, using my Attacker to send an TCP RST packet with the NetWag software. I know the source and destination port numbers and ip's but when i send the packet, with Wireshark i can see that it was received by de Victim, but the connection doesn't go down.
Does the problem is in the Sequence and/or Ack numbers?
P.s. both firewalls are shut down.
Yes, the sequence numbers are very important. Packets out of sequence essentially are ignored. In fact, the sequence number used to start at 1 and increment from there but that was later changed to start with a random number to help prevent the very thing you are trying to do.
NOTE: you also have to ensure that the packets are correctly formatted such as having a correct checksum otherwise they will be ignored anyway.

Identify fake UDP Packet

I want to identify an UDP or TCP packet that have its source IP address faked. My guess is that even if the packet is faked with a program such has hping, the MAC src address is still the same on all the faked packets, is this correct?
If my idea is not correct, how can I identify such packets that are being faked and looks like it has different source for each and every packet?
Thanks.
MAC addresses can be faked too.
With TCP, its easy to identify / handle this. You'll reply to a fake SYN packet with a SYN-ACK. If it was a real client, it'd reply with an ACK to complete the handshake. Only caveat is that you'll have to implement syn-cookies so that you don't create state & use up resources while waiting for an ACK.
With UDP, there is no way to know, since the protocol is connection-less. If you send a reply to the fake packet, you're not guaranteed a response from a "real" client. So there is no way to identify a fake one.
The way I see it, UDP and TCP have nothing to do with this. You're talking about only layer 2 (MAC) and layer 3 (IP). Even at that though, you have no way of knowing, because the source MAC address should be that of the closest router to the recipient (assuming the packet did not originate in your subnet.) So you should see the same MAC address for most all inbound packets (again, internet traffic only).
Now there are profiling tools like p0f that work on signatures of packets, and you could try and do some heuristics based on that information, but nothing very concreted could be determined.
From the packet you can get the MAC address of the nearest node. Yeah you can send ACK packet to the fake source address(IP) and then use Traceroute command to know the path of the source packet, so that you can atleast find the location of the originating. It works well in TCP and you can have acknowledgement also.

Building a webserver, client doesn't acknowledge HTTP 200 OK frame

I'm building my own webserver based on a tutorial.
I have found a simple way to initiate a TCP connection and send one segment of http data (the webserver will run on a microcontroller, so it will be very small)
Anyway, the following is the sequence I need to go through:
receive SYN
send SYN,ACK
receive ACK (the connection is now established)
receive ACK with HTTP GET command
send ACK
send FIN,ACK with HTTP data (e.g 200 OK)
receive FIN,ACK <- I don't recieve this packet!
send ACK
Everything works fine until I send my acknowledgement and HTTP 200 OK message.
The client won't send an acknowledgement to those two packages and thus
no webpage is being displayed.
I've added a pcap file of the sequence how I recorded it with wireshark.
Pcap file: http://cl.ly/5f5/httpdump2.pcap
All sequence and acknowledgement numbers are correct, checksum are ok. Flags are also right.
I have no idea what is going wrong.
I think that step 6. should be just FIN, without ACK. What packet from the client are you ACKing at that place? Also I don't see why 4. should be an ACK instead of just a normal data packet - the client ACKed the connection at 3.
This diagram on TCP states might help.
WireShark says (of the FIN packet):
Broken TCP: The acknowledge field is
nonzero while the ACK flag is not set
I don't know for sure that's what's causing your problem, but if WireShark doesn't like that packet, maybe the client doesn't either. So, it should be FIN+ACK, or you should set the acknowledge field to 0.
If that doesn't solve it, you might also try sending the data first, then a separate FIN packet. It's valid to include data with the FIN, but it's more common to send the FIN by itself (as seen in the other pcap trace you posted earlier).
Also, you should probably be setting the PUSH flag in the packet with the 200 OK
Finally, I don't see any retransmission attempts for the FIN packet - is that because you stopped the capture right away?
The IP length field was consequently counting 8 bits too much. I made a mistake in my calculations. Everythings works like a charm now!

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