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    How to enable Traffic Flow Confidentiality (TFC)

    IPsec
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    • L
      laped
      last edited by

      Got a IPSEC IKEv2 Tunnel up and running where a linux client connects to the pfsense 2.2.2 server. When connecting i got the following message:

      received ESP_TFC_PADDING_NOT_SUPPORTED, not using ESPv3 TFC padding

      From the following RFC of an IPsec implementation, TFC should be implemented.

      https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4303#page-17

      From strongswan doc (ipsec.conf) TFC is defined by:

      tfc = <value>number of bytes to pad ESP payload data to. Traffic Flow Confidentiality is currently supported in IKEv2 and applies to outgoing packets only. The special value %mtu fills up ESP packets with padding to have the size of the MTU.</value>

      So is it true that TFC isn't supported in pfSense? Or is the option just missing in the webConfigurator?

      Best Regards
      Lars Pedersen

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      • L
        laped
        last edited by

        bump..

        120+ views but noone with any feedback :/

        Getting TFC to work with pfsense would be a nice feature for me since it prevents statistical traffic analysis attacks.

        I have directed the issue to freebsd's mailing list since it seems like it needs to be implemented in the kernel.

        So iam not giving up yet :)

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        • jimpJ
          jimp Rebel Alliance Developer Netgate
          last edited by

          If you edit the ipsec code to add the line into strongSwan.conf, does it work? If so, then it's just missing from the GUI. Feel free to open a feature request on https://redmine.pfsense.org

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          • L
            laped
            last edited by

            Hi jimp. Thanks for the response.

            Tried that a few days ago and it doesn't work either :/ I have checked the freebsd trunk out and can see that the last changes to the source code for IPsec and ESP is from 2000/2001 and the RFC that describes TFC is from 2005.

            So i guess some development in freebsd is needed to make this work.

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