netdev - Re: [PATCH v3] net/ipv4: always honour route mtu during forwarding

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Date:   Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:54:19 -0700 (PDT)
From:   David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
To:     zenczykowski@...il.com
Cc:     maze@...gle.com, netdev@...r.kernel.org, edumazet@...gle.com,
        willemb@...gle.com, lorenzo@...gle.com, sgill@...cinc.com,
        vparadka@....qualcomm.com, twear@...cinc.com, dsahern@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3] net/ipv4: always honour route mtu during forwarding

From: Maciej Żenczykowski <zenczykowski@...il.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 13:18:15 -0700

> From: Maciej Żenczykowski <maze@...gle.com>
> 
> Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt:46 says:
>   ip_forward_use_pmtu - BOOLEAN
>     By default we don't trust protocol path MTUs while forwarding
>     because they could be easily forged and can lead to unwanted
>     fragmentation by the router.
>     You only need to enable this if you have user-space software
>     which tries to discover path mtus by itself and depends on the
>     kernel honoring this information. This is normally not the case.
>     Default: 0 (disabled)
>     Possible values:
>     0 - disabled
>     1 - enabled
> 
> Which makes it pretty clear that setting it to 1 is a potential
> security/safety/DoS issue, and yet it is entirely reasonable to want
> forwarded traffic to honour explicitly administrator configured
> route mtus (instead of defaulting to device mtu).
> 
> Indeed, I can't think of a single reason why you wouldn't want to.
> Since you configured a route mtu you probably know better...
> 
> It is pretty common to have a higher device mtu to allow receiving
> large (jumbo) frames, while having some routes via that interface
> (potentially including the default route to the internet) specify
> a lower mtu.
> 
> Note that ipv6 forwarding uses device mtu unless the route is locked
> (in which case it will use the route mtu).
> 
> This approach is not usable for IPv4 where an 'mtu lock' on a route
> also has the side effect of disabling TCP path mtu discovery via
> disabling the IPv4 DF (don't frag) bit on all outgoing frames.
> 
> I'm not aware of a way to lock a route from an IPv6 RA, so that also
> potentially seems wrong.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Maciej Żenczykowski <maze@...gle.com>

Applied and queued up for -stable, thank you.