Attacking the IPsec Standards in Encryption-only Configurations

We describe new attacks which break any RFC- compliant implementation of IPsec making use of encryption-only ESP in tunnel mode. The new attacks are both efficient and realistic: they are ciphertext-only and need only the capability to eavesdrop on ESP-encrypted traffic and to inject traffic into the network. We report on our experiences in applying the attacks to a variety of implementations of IPsec.

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