Rule:
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Sid:
499

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Summary:
This event is generated when a large ICMP packet is detected. Also known
as the "Ping of Death".

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Impact:
Denial of Service (DoS) by system crash or bandwidth utilisation.

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Detailed Information:
Some implementations of the IP stack may result in a system crash 
or may hang when a large ICMP packet is sent to them. Alternatively 
a large number of these packets may result in link saturation, 
especially where bandwidth is limited.

This attack was prevalent a number of years ago when the TCP/IP stack of
a number of operating systems could not handle large packet payloads.

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Affected Systems:
	Multiple older systems.

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Attack Scenarios: 
A malicious individual may send a series of large ICMP packets 
to a host with the intention of either crashing or hanging the host, 
or to saturate the available bandwidth.

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Ease of Attack:
Simple.

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False Positives:
A number of load balancing applications use 1500 byte ICMP packets to 
determine the most efficent route to a host by measuring the latency 
of multiple paths.

HP-UX systems configured with PMTU discovery will send echo requests 
in response to several types of network connections. PMTU Discovery 
is enabled in HP-UX 10.30 and 11.0x by default.

Windows 2000 uses large ICMP payloads to determine the speed of a link
when utilizing a Windows domain controller.

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False Negatives:
None Known

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Corrective Action:

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Contributors:
Original rule writer unknown
Original document author unkown
Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team
Nigel Houghton <nigel.houghton@sourcefire.com>

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Additional References:

ICMP Traffic - Seth Stein
http://www.wfu.edu/~steinsj5/work/icmp.html

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