What if in IPsec I have confidentiality BUT NOT integrity? What are the dangers?
ESP in IPsec v2 only provides integrity of the payload, not of the header. So my question is about that. The possible dangers in not having integrity of header, while having ESP active for payload.
What are the potential risks if an attacker attempts to modify a packet header, given that there is no integrity check, but confidentiality of the payload is maintained? The attacker doesn’t possess the key, so even a minor alteration - such as changing a single bit - would drastically affect the decryption process at the destination, resulting in random data. So, what exactly is the threat or the potential for an attack here? I’m struggling to envision a plausible attack scenario.
The only attack I can think of is a Denial of Service (DoS), because the destination, after decryption, would be left with random data. However, this would be the case even if Authentication Header (AH) was used instead of Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP), and a DoS attack could occur regardless.
Are there any other scenarios that I might be overlooking?
