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Multiple Vendor Small TCP MSS Denial of Service Vulnerability

A potential denial of service vulnerability exists in several TCP stack implementations.

TCP has a MSS (maximum segment size) option that is used by a TCP client to announce to a peer the maximum amount of TCP data that can be sent per segment. The potential for attacks exists because in many cases only a small minimum value is enforced for the MSS.

By setting the MSS to a low value (such as 1) and making requests for large amounts of data through a TCP service, an attacker could effectively cause a denial of service by causing a large workload on a system.