>>> From IDS/IPS Evasion with SynCookies
I will start off by covering the relevant parts of syncookies. There are many types of Denial of service attack, but the most powerful are low rate DoS attacks; attacks that need very little of the attackers resources, but cause major disruption to the attacked host or network.
One such attack was the SYN flood attack. The attacker would spoof thousands of packets from fake hosts. Since the destination would half-open a connection for each of these, its resources would soon be overwhelmed with these faked connections, and it would then stop acting as it should (either by rejecting new connections, or dropping old ones, or even crashing outright).
Some clever folks devised TCP Syncookies to combat this problem. Whenever a SYN was received, the connection was not opened by the destination. Instead, it SYN-ACK’d using a ‘magic’ sequence number that it calculated. The calculation involved the IP Source, Destination, TCP Source port and Destination port, along with an unknown random bit of data that only the server would know. No entry was added to the servers table, so its resources would stay free. When the client would ACK, it would increase the sequence number by one. The server would see this ack, and would do the same math it did before to create its magic sequence number, and subtract one from the received number.
Since the number is only based on the IP, Port, and random number, the numbers should be identical, even though it would not remember the original connection. If the two matched, it would open the connection. Since the magic number was effectively unguessable to the client, this would make it impossible for an attacker to flood the server with a low rate SYN flood attack.