Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)¶

TCP is the transport almost everything else rides on, and it was built to be reliable, not honest. A connection is identified by four numbers and trusted on the strength of a sequence number that fits the window, so an attacker who can guess or observe that number can inject into a session, tear it down, or sit in the middle of it without ever touching the application above. These are attacks on the transport in its own right: hijacking and exhausting connections, slipping past stateful middleboxes, disrupting it directly. Because BGP rides a single long-lived TCP session, some of them land hardest on routers, and that angle is drawn where TCP meets Rootways: BGP.