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Bug #1665

closed

Default maximum packet size is insufficient when VLAN tags are present (and not stripped)

Added by Ray Ruvinskiy over 8 years ago. Updated almost 8 years ago.

Status:
Closed
Priority:
Normal
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Target version:
Affected Versions:
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Description

The default packet size in most cases ends up being 1516 bytes. This is because GetIfaceMaxHWHeaderLength in util-ioctl.c will generally return SLL_HEADER_LEN, which is 16, since the if statements at the beginning of the file won't match (they're using strcmp while the intention is to check for a prefix? I'm unclear on what the intent was).

If a VLAN tag is present and not stripped (e.g., when capturing on a bridge interface with VLAN-tagged traffic), the maximum packet size is 1518 bytes. It is 1522 bytes in the rarer case of QinQ traffic. However, suricata under the default configuration silently drops packets larger than 1516 bytes since it considers them truncated (this happens due to the checks in DecodeIPV4Packet), which leads to reassembly gaps in the presence of full and nearly-full VLAN-tagged packets.

This can be corrected by setting the default-packet-size option in suricata.yaml, but debugging this issue proved to be quite challenging. What do you think of the idea of adding a counter for when suricata drops packets because it considers them to be truncated? Also, should the maximum default size be raised, or at least the logic in GetIfaceMaxHWHeaderLength fixed to perform detection based on the interface name?

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