observes a NAT/Firewall signaling message towards a corporate network. After the signaling message exchange was successful, the user Alice is allowed to traverse the company firewall based on the establish packet filter in order to contact her internal mail server. Now, the adversary Eve, who was monitoring the signaling exchange, is able to build a data packet towards this mail server that will pass the company firewall. The packet will hit the mail server and cause some actions, and the mail server will reply with some response messages. Depending on the exact location of the adversary and the degree of routing asymmetry, the adversary might even see the response messages. Note that for this attack to work, Alice does not need to participate in the exchange of signaling messages.
We could imagine using attributes of a flow identifier that is not related to source and destination addresses. For example, we could think of a flow identifier for which only the 21-bit Flow ID is used (without source and destination IP address). Identity spoofing and injecting traffic is much easier since a packet only needs to be marked and an adversary can use a nearly arbitrary endpoint identifier to achieve the desired result. Obviously, though, the endpoint identifiers are not irrelevant, because the messages have to hit some nodes in the network where NSIS signaling messages installed state (in the above example, they would have to hit the same firewall).
Data traffic marking based on DiffServ is such an example. Whenever an ingress router uses only marked incoming data traffic for admission control procedures, various attacks are possible. These problems have been known in the DiffServ community for a long time and have been documented in various DiffServ-related documents. The IPsec protection of DiffServ Code Points is described in Section 6.2 of [RFC2745]. Related security issues (for example denial of service attacks) are described in Section 6.1 of the same document.
4.5. Unprotected Authorization Information
Authorization is an important criterion for providing resources such