[pptp-server] Bug in PPPD CCP Negotiation/change_key bug

[Frank Cusack]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 03:25:06AM -0800, Jordan Mendelson wrote:
> After three hours of attempting to get a MacOS X version of PPTP to work
> (based on FreeBSD's userspace ppp which is terribly difficult to find the
> source for without a FBSD machine), I finally figured out what was wrong.
> 
> In FreeBSD's MPPE implementation both the input and output sides have two
> different states with different coherency counts and separate options
> including stateless/stateful.
> 
> Unfortunately, it appears that the Linux PPPD daemon will happily negotiate
> stateful MPPE outbound and stateless MPPE inbound (may have that reversed.)
> This obviously causes a problem because when trying to communicate with the
> FreeBSD ppp daemon as it changes it's key for only one side of the
> connection every packet whereas the Linux end flips both keys.

Linux bug -- should be fixed shortly.

> I finally was able to the world from my MacOS X machine using 128 bit
> encryption and MSCHAPv2 through my Linux box when I changed ppd's
> ccp_reqci() function to always NAK packets with p[2] (stateless
> specification) set to 0.
> 
> I'd submit a patch however, this is not the correct way to fix this problem.
> As I'm unfamiliar with the official PPTP spec (and PPP in general), I do not
> know whether FreeBSD's ppp daemon is doing it the correct way. It is

FreeBSD is correct.  CCP is unidirectional.  Your patch is incorrect in
either case as simply denying stateful mode is not a good solution.

> certainly wasting more CPU than the Linux ppp daemon (since it has two sets
> of state, it seems to flip both sets of keys independently), but if the spec
> says they can be negotiated separately.. well I'm not sure what to do.
> 
> It will be necessary to fix this if anyone wants to connect a FreeBSD, MacOS
> X or NetBSD machine to a Linux box. I'm not sure what other platforms this
> might affect... But if it's part of the spec, there is a good chance that
> other vendors might do the exact same thing.
> 
> Again, please tack my address onto the CC list as I'm not on this list. I'm
> going to sleep now.

/fc