potentially disallowing IP fragmentation on wg packets, and handling routing loops better

Roman Mamedov rm at romanrm.net
Mon Jun 7 11:13:13 UTC 2021


On Mon, 7 Jun 2021 11:34:21 +0200
"Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason at zx2c4.com> wrote:

> 2) Local egress fragmentation WOULD be affected by this and is the
> most relevant thing in this discussion. In this case, a packet that
> gets encrypted and winds up being larger than the mtu of the interface
> that the encrypted packet will go out of gets fragmented. In this
> case, we could likely respond with an ICMP packet or similar in-path
> error. But keep in mind this whole situation is local: it usually will
> only happen out of misconfiguration. The best fix for the diagram I
> drew would be for the administrator to decrease the MTU of the
> wireguard interface to 1412.

In the L2 tunneling scenario the large VXLAN packets are generated locally, as
it will be common for the same host (aka "the router") to be both a WG peer
and a VXLAN VTEP, so it is going to be affected.

> So, of those concerned about this, which concerns are actually about
> (2) and (3)? Of those, which ones are about (2)? If you have concerns
> specifically about (2) that couldn't be fixed with reasonable system
> administration, I'd like to hear why and what the setup is that leads
> to that situation.

My described case is being able to transparently bridge two Ethernet LANs.

Hopefully the answer isn't "you don't really need to do that" or "apply
reasonable system administration and set up routing instead".

> As an aside, Roman asked about TTL. When tunneling, the outer packet
> header always must take the new TTL of the route to the tunnel
> endpoint, and not do anything with the potentially much smaller inner
> TTL.

As far as I can see the inner TTL is not smaller than usual on WG tunnels (64).
You could inherit it to the outside of the tunnel, like GRE does:
https://serverfault.com/questions/827239/gre-tunnel-ttl-number
But of course that's leaking a tiny bit of information about the encrypted
tunnel, dunno how critical that would be.

-- 
With respect,
Roman


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