Disable TCP timestamp

Question

Hi,

we are looking for solution to disable the TCP timestamp in Windows server 2012. Reason its vulnerability in security report.

I have run following the command

netsh int tcp set global timestamps=disabled

But still nmap I’m able to see the uptime of the servers. Please let me know is there way to remediate the findings and also whether it leads to performance degradation of the server

Regards
Vijay

Answer 1

Hi,

Thanks for posting in Q&A platform.

TCP timestamps are used to improve performance as well as protect against late packets messing up your data flow. If you disable TCP timestamps you should expect worse performance and less reliable connections. This is the case regardless of the method used to disable TCP timestamps.

Any modifications made to packets by a middlebox can cause additional problems, because TCP endpoints are not required to take such modifications into account.

TCP timestamps are required to grow monotonically over time. Thus they are necessarily predictable.

So in general, it is not recommended to disable TCP timestamp option. For more detailed information, please refer to the RFC below:

TCP Extensions for High Performance

Best Regards,
Sunny

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Answer 2

Thank you, it helped me a lot to protect my server and website from attacks