From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 14:23:17 +0800

quoted text
> The number 17 does look very strange, however, after going through
> the logic it does seem correct.
> 
> To calculate the minimum safe trailer length we need to consider
> the worst-case scenario, and that is a packet where the payload
> just happens to be one byte less than the cipher block size.
> 
> ESP always adds two bytes, then pads to at least the cipher
> block size, follwed by the authentication value.  So in the
> worst case we need to add
> 
> 	2 + (blocksize - 1) + authlen	=
> 	blocksize + 1 + authlen
> 
> which is exactly what Patrick's patch does.

Thanks for explaining this Herbert, but I have to admit it's a bit
disappointing :-)

So what we have is that headerlen is actually a function f() which
depends upon the payload length and the size of any IP options, rather
than a fixed value that can be computed based upon the cipher
blocksize, encap mode, and device MTU.

I guess if we really cared about this we could make headerlen a method
rather than a value, but I doubt it's that much of an issue.
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