how is TCP's checksum calculated when we use tcpdump to capture packets which we send out

1
votes

I am trying to generate a series of packets to simulate the TCP 3-way handshake procedure, my first step is to capture the real connecting packets, and try to re-send the same packets from the same machine, but it didn't work at first.

finally I found it out that the packet I captured with tcpdump is not exactly what my computer sent out, the TCP's checksum field is changed and it lead me to thinkk that I can establish a tcp connection even the TCP checksum is incorrect.

so my question is how is the checksum field calculated? is it modified by tcpdump or hardware? why is it changed? Is it a bug of tcpdump? or it's because the calculation is omitted.

the following is the screenshot I captured from my host machine and a virtual machinne, you can see that the same packet captured on differnet machine are all the same except for the TCP checksum.

and the small window is my virtual machine, I used command "ssh 10.82.25.138" from the host to generate these packets

enter image description here

1
linuxtcpchecksumtcpdumpnic

1 Answers

8
votes

What you are seeing may be the result of checksum offloading. To quote from the wireshark wiki (http://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/Offloading):

Most modern operating systems support some form of network offloading, where some network processing happens on the NIC instead of the CPU. Normally this is a great thing. It can free up resources on the rest of the system and let it handle more connections. If you're trying to capture traffic it can result in false errors and strange or even missing traffic.

On systems that support checksum offloading, IP, TCP, and UDP checksums are calculated on the NIC just before they're transmitted on the wire. In Wireshark these show up as outgoing packets marked black with red Text and the note [incorrect, should be xxxx (maybe caused by "TCP checksum offload"?)].

Wireshark captures packets before they are sent to the network adapter. It won't see the correct checksum because it has not been calculated yet. Even worse, most OSes don't bother initialize this data so you're probably seeing little chunks of memory that you shouldn't.

Although this is for wireshark, the same principle applies. In your host machine, you see the wrong checksum because it just hasn't been filled in yet. It looks right on the guest, because before it's sent out on the "wire" it is filled in. Try disabling checksum offloading on the interface which is handling this traffic, e.g.:

ethtool -K eth0 rx off tx off

if it's eth0.