InfiniBand / RoCEv2 transport - RNIC connection state (QP number, PSN) on Mellanox ConnectX-class and compatible RNICs

CVSS 8.6NCVD-2021-009-infiniband-rocev2-transport-rnicFirmware, BMC & network fabricReDMArkReDMArk QP/PSN predictabilityRDMA packet injection by impersonationRothenberger et al., USENIX Security 2021curated

Impact

RDMA has no cryptographic binding between a packet and the connection it claims to belong to. A Reliable Connected queue pair is identified only by destination QP number plus packet sequence number, and ReDMArk showed both are highly predictable on real RNICs - QP numbers are handed out near-sequentially by the firmware and initial PSNs are drawn from a weak generator. Anyone who can put a frame on the fabric with the victim's source GID/LID can inject a valid-looking RDMA WRITE or SEND into an established connection between two other tenants. On a shared GPU cluster that means a neighbouring tenant, or a compromised node anywhere in the same partition, can write into another tenant's registered memory - which in an AI cluster is model weights, KV cache, gradient buffers, or NCCL communication buffers - with no software on the victim host ever seeing the write.

Who can reach it

Attacker needs one host with an RNIC on the same L2/L3 RoCE domain or IB subnet as the victims (a rented bare-metal node, a container with a VF or an SR-IOV VF, or a compromised storage/management node). They enumerate the QPN space by opening their own connections to the victim host to learn the allocator's current position, then brute-force or predict PSN and emit crafted BTH/RETH headers with a spoofed source. On RoCEv2 the outer frame is ordinary UDP/4791, so spoofing is as easy as a raw socket if the switch does not enforce source MAC/IP filtering. No exploit of a software bug is required - this is the protocol working as designed.

What to do

No patch exists; this is architectural. Config change first: put every tenant in its own InfiniBand partition (P_Key) or its own RoCE VLAN/VRF, and turn on switch-side source-address enforcement (port security / IP source guard / MAC learning locks) so a node cannot emit frames claiming another node's GID - that is a switch config push, no reload needed on most platforms. Where the NIC supports it, enable RoCEv2 link-layer encryption/authentication (IPsec or PSP offload on ConnectX-6 Dx and later, or NVIDIA BlueField DPU-terminated crypto) - this is a firmware flash plus driver upgrade on the NIC fleet and costs a rolling host reboot per node. Hard-partitioning tenants onto separate physical fabrics or separate IB subnets is the only complete answer and is a capacity/cost decision, not a patch.

References

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/rothenberger https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/sec21summer-redmark.pdf https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/xing

This entry is curated: imported from vendor advisories with machine assistance, not yet individually verified. Confirm against your vendor's advisory before acting, and report anything wrong.