FAQ

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FAQ

( we will sort this in categories once we have more )

Which IKE Exchange modes does libreswan support?

The IANA Registry lists all official Exchange Modes. There are a few IKEv1 Modes that are very common despite never gotten past the draft stage.

Supported:

Not supported


Should I use the NETKEY or KLIPS IPsec stack with libreswan?

At this point we recommend using the NETKEY stack for most deployments. If you are using an embedded platform with a cryptographic hardware offload device, it might be better to use KLIPS.

The NETKEY IPsec stack requires no kernel recompiles on most Linux distributions, so it is the easiest stack to use in most standard deployments. It offers a larger selection of cryptographic algorithm support, including the IPsec Suite B algorithms AES CTR, AES GCM and SHA2. It does cause a little additional delay with on-demand IPsec tunnels because it does not implement first+last packet caching. NETKEY supports OCF only using the cryptosoft driver, and is lacking native driver support for most cryptographic hardware cards. NETKEY also does not distribute the load of a single IPsec SA over different CPU's. NETKEY has support for Linux VTI for IPsec SA reference tracking.

The KLIPS IPsec stack offers easier debugging with tcpdump and easier iptables firewall rules due to its use of separate ipsecX interfaces. It also plays a little nicer with on-demand tunneling as it will hold on the first+last packet sent while the tunnel is being setup, and will release those packets once the IPsec tunnel is established. KLIPS distributes the load of a single IPsec SA over multiple CPU's. It supports all OCF hardware devices when compiled with OCF support. The MAST variant of KLIPS use IPsec SAref for IPsec SA reference tracking and is also used for L2TP/IPsec deployments requiring SAref tracking. Although it is recommended to use VPN_server_for_remote_clients_using_IKEv1_XAUTH instead of L2TP/IPsec.

Is Libreswan vulnerable to the OpenSSL "Heartbleed" exploit?

No, see Libreswan_and_Heartbleed

Is Libreswan vulnerable to bash CVE-2014-6271 or CVE-2014-7169?

No, libreswan is not vulnerable

Libreswan sanitizers strings that may come from the network, such as XAUTH username, domain and DNS servers by passing it through filter functions remove_metachar() and cisco_stringify() before assigning it to environment variables that are passed to the updown scripts that invoke bash. These filters remove dangerous characters including the ' character needed for these bash exploits.

Is Libreswan vulnerable to NSS CVE-2014-1568 RSA Signature Forgery?

Yes, please upgrade NSS to one of 3.17.1, 3.16.1 or 3.16.5.

This only affects libreswan when using X.509 certificates. Raw RSA keys using leftrsasigkey/rightrsasigkey are not affected. Connections using auth=secret (PSK) are also not affected.

See Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2014-73

Module unloading error on shutdown or restart: Module esp4 is in use

ERROR: Module xfrm4_mode_tunnel is in use
ERROR: Module esp4 is in use
FAILURE to unload NETKEY esp4/esp6 module

This has been fixed in libreswan-3.9. Please upgrade

My ssh sessions hang or connectivity is very slow

This could be an MTU issue. The overhead of IPsec encryption (and possibly ESPinUDP encapsulation) yields a slightly smaller packet size. This can cause problems. A good way to confirm MTU problems is if you can login remotely over the IPsec tunnel using ssh, but issuing "ls -l /usr" causes the session to hang. Try adjusting the MTU with: 

iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS  --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

If that does not help, try hardcoding it yourself: 

iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --set-mss 1460

As a last case alternative, you can try lowering the MTU on the internal interface of your IPsec server so that the PMTU discovery locally already goes back to 1460, eg using ifconfig eth1 mtu 1460.

When using hundreds of tunnels on a xen based cloud system like AWS, a fraction of tunnels fail regularly

This is a known issue that could be a problem of the aesni kernel module in combination with the xen hypervisor. Try unloading the aesni.ko kernel module on the xen server. If you can confirm this fixes your issue (we cannot change the AWS servers), please email the swan-dev list with a confirmation.

My XAUTH authentication via PAM always claims the password is incorrect on centos6

This is an odd bug (feature?) that shows up when you have disabled selinux in /etc/sysconfig/selinux. Running selinux in permissive (or enforcing) mode seems to resolve this.

Common error messages

ERROR: asynchronous network error report on eth0 (sport=4500) for message to xx.xx.xxx.xxx port 4500, complainant yy.yy.yyy.yyy: Message too long [errno 90, origin ICMP type 3 code 4 (not authenticated)]

These errors are often intermittent, it depends on your application data that is getting encrypted. Your NAT'ed IPsec tunnel is using ESPinUDP, and the additional UDP header caused some of your packets to be too big. See the previous answer and try lowing your mtu. Use an insanely small mtu like 1300 or 1200 for confirmation. Then try to bring it up higher to what seems to work reliably for you.

ERROR: asynchronous network error report on eth0 (sport=4500) for message to xx.xx.xxx.xxx port 4500, complainant yy.yy.yyy.yyy: No route to host [errno 113, origin ICMP type 3 code 1(not authenticated)]

These errors often happen 15 minutes after the tunnel successfully established. It's most likely that the tunnel was idle and the NAT router removed the nat mapping. Or the NAT router rebooted and lost state. It no longer knows which client to send the packet to. Ensure your connection uses nat-keepalive=yes. Possibly decrease the global keep-alive= value to send more frequent keep-alive packets. Alternatively, enable DPD on the connection to cause some regular traffic on idle tunnels.

ERROR: asynchronous network error report on eth0 (sport=500) for message to xx.xx.xxx.xxx port 500, complainant yy.yy.yyy.yyy: Connection refused [errno 111, origin ICMP type 3 code 3 (not authenticated)]

This error means the other end is not (or no longer) running an IKE daemon. Ensure the IKE daemon is running on the remote system. If you see this error during a negotiation, it could be that the remote IKE daemon crashed or stopped listening. On Mac OSX if the IKE daemon is not allowed to read the proper X.509 certificate, it will only realize this partially into the IKE negotiation and terminate, resulting in this error.

error: ignoring informational payload, type NO_PROPOSAL_CHOSEN msgid=00000000

This error means exactly what i says. The IKE proposal(s) sent to the server were rejected. This means there is a configuration mismatch between libreswan and the remote IPsec server. Usually this is a configuration mismatch in the ike= or esp= (phase2alg=) setting. But other options could also be wrong, such as authby= or pfs= or aggrmode=

ssh gives error: Corrupted MAC on input. Disconnecting: Packet corrupt

This usually indicates MTU issues. You can try lowering the mtu using the mtu= option or by changing the actual mtu on the proper interface on the libreswan server. This error is known to happen on Amazon EC2 AMI types that use PV (xen) instances. Switching to Amazon HVM instances seems to resolve the problem on AWS.


esp=aes_gcm is failing with ERROR: netlink response for Add SA esp.578a7284@10.65.200.5 included errno 22: Invalid argument

There is a Linux kernel bug in the aesni-intel driver on x86_64. See rhbz#1176211 The AESNI hardware acceleration kernel module does not properly support 256 or 192 bit keys for AES_GCM. You can either switch to 128 bit keys or blacklist or unload the aesni-intel kernel module. Another alternative is to switch from AES_GCM to AES-SHA2, although that will cut the performance in half.

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