IP Fragmentation Attacks

IP Fragmentation Attacks

IP fragmentation is the process of breaking up a single Internet Protocol (IP) datagram into multiple packets of smaller size. Every network link has a characteristic size of messages that may be transmitted, called the maximum transmission unit (MTU).

Part of the TCP/IP suite is the Internet Protocol (IP) which resides at the Internet Layer of this model. IP is responsible for the transmission of packets between network end points. IP includes some features which provide basic measures of fault-tolerance (time to live, checksum), traffic prioritization (type of service) and support for the fragmentation of larger packets into multiple smaller packets (ID field, fragment offset). The support for fragmentation of larger packets provides a protocol allowing routers to fragment a packet into smaller packets when the original packet is too large for the supporting datalink frames. IP fragmentation exploits (attacks) use the fragmentation protocol within IP as an attack vector.