Monday, July 1, 2013

TCP ports "greater than 65535"

Let me tell this nice story. And yes, there are no TCP ports above 65535, but earlier today after receiving the credentials, I connected without a second thought to A.B.C.D:73382. I was even happy it worked, because the first time I tried "by mistake" port 63382 and I had problems with the login. And this time it worked. But there is a problem - the port number should have been smaller than 65535. Still, take a look at the following picture and notice the strange TCP/IP connection:

It is TCP port 73382. And the connection works (more or less optimal, but it works). But what actually happens is the interesting part. The connection in the image is a port translation from 73382 to 3389. This means there is a device doing the translation - in our case a linux box. And there is a program listening on port 73382. Well, not exactly...
 
TCP header uses 16 bits for representing the source port and 16 bits for representing the destination port. 

The 16 bits limit the maximum number of ports to 65536 (2^16) having the numbers between 0 and 65535. Number 73382 needs actually 17 bits for its binary form - 10001111010100110. The only way to fit 17 bits into 16 bits is to truncate the 17 bits. The only question is what part to truncate - left bit or the right bit. To find out the answer I used good old wireshark:

The communication takes place on port 7846 - which on 16 bits looks like this 0001111010100110. So, it truncates the left most bit.What happens is that a small piece of code (perl or python) will successfully  accept to open a socket using numbers bigger 65535 - only it  fits the number on 16 bits. Remember, on a linux system "everything is a file; if it is not file, it is a process".
There are client programs that using a simple input check do not allow using strange numbers, however RDC is not one of them. And after all, it was actually a nice debug.

2 comments:

T said...

nice Finding .. but this can be a real problem in an environment where you actually use a lot of these "truncated" TCP ports.
So, is it a bug? or a feature?

Naomi Collier said...

Thanks ffor sharing this