Question

Write 3 vulnerabilities related to transport layer protocols and processes. Explain each vulnerability and it's significance to your data security or privacy.

Answer 1

Explanation of three vulnerabilities related to transport layer protocols and processes and their significances to data security or privacy:

In general, it is very important, we secure our systems to from attackers attacking the systems due to any and all their vulnerabilities, thus safeguarding data and privacy. The processes in this discussion would be on system and user application processes of both, source and the destination machines. This Transport Layer hosts three protocols- Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Any and all vulnerabilities are related to these processes and protocols.

* Three-way handshake security vulnerabilities or flaws with respect to and related to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) for reliable communication, where, the vulnerability is the prediction of the TCP sequence number.

This is a potential and possible risk, as the sequence number gets incremented by a constant amount every second and by half the amount every time there is a connection initiation. In case, a hacker accesses and even connects to the server as a legitimate user or client machine, he/she would be able to guess the next sequence number. This guess of the next sequence number would result in a session hijack and TCP injection attacks.

Also, it leads to TCP blind spoofing- one of the forms of hijacking. The attacker, in this case, would be able to guess both, the port number and sequence number of the session in process. Once the attacker gets hold of the correct port and sequence number, he/she would be able to carry out injection attacks. Here, there is an issue with the availability of the server and less or no communication between the legitimate and the server.

* SYN flood: This attack, spoofs multiple SYN packets using a source or sender address without even it existing. Later these packets are sent to the target server. The target server, receiving the fake or spoofed SYN packets, it replies sending a response with a SYN-ACK packet to the source address, that would be unreachable, thus creating many half-opened sessions, as the expected ACK packets are not received by the server for proper initiation of a session. This leads the server to be overloaded, poorly performing and would even go down, fail, or crash in the end. Even this attack accounts to DoS attack resulting in a server blocking further connections to be established and any and all legitimate users' connection requests would not be handled and responded and the connection would be dropped. This vulnerability should be addressed and be provided with security, as it affects the very availability of the server in providing services to the client machines.

* UDP flood attack: In another sense, it is a Denial of Service (DoS) attack exploiting UDP services that reply to requests. A hacker would overwhelm a targeted host, server, or machine bombarding with 100s and 1,000s of illegitimate requests sent (using bots) to specific ports creating a huge spike in the traffic on the network. This is very important for the basic business requirement of a service, where the requirement is the availability of the server, website, or service.