Description

Customer has an issue with SCTP traffic passing through SRX5600 firewalls.

 

Initially Customer configured a security policy in one direction which did not work. Then we followed article KB31567 [juniper.net] and created a policy in both directions, with an application (sctp-29168) that has "alg gprs-sctp" configured, along with a SCTP inspection profile (nat-only) in both directions:

 

show security sctp

profile sctp-profile-1 {

nat-only;

association-timeout 1440;

permit {

payload-protocol all;

 

The SCTP INIT comes from a remote site and hits a static NAT rule on the SRX5600, which forwards it to an internal host.

 

The static NAT rules are :

 

user@router# show security nat static rule-set PWS-RULESET rule test

match {

destination-address x.x.x.x/32;

then {

static-nat {

prefix {

y.y.y.y/32;

routing-instance PWS; 

 

 

After configuring bi-directional policies the traffic is permitted, however the service flaps every ~2 minutes. Customer sees that heartbeats are being sent and after a couple of minutes the host on the SRX5600 side sends ABORT chunks.

 

Customer also see that the INIT ACK IPs are not translated.

 

According to the documentation

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/gtp-sctp/topics/topic-map/security-gprs-sctp-configuration.html

 

Only static NAT is supported and the STCP internal IPs should be translated according to the NAT rule, when using a SCTP inspection profile. Customer is using the nat-only option here.

Also the commands below shows all counters as 0

 

">show security sctp counters"

">show security sctp association"

 

 

 

Symptoms

Customer is monitoring and seeing that the SCTP sessions get established, but then within 2 minutes the sessions flap.


Solution

There were 2 suggestions to the customer.

 

1). Customer had configured routing-instance inside the static nat.

user@router# show security nat static rule-set PWS-RULESET rule test

match {

destination-address x.x.x.x/32;

}

then {

static-nat {

prefix {

y.y.y.y/32;

routing-instance PWS; 

 

It was confirmed that routing-instance option inside Static nat is only supported from 23.1 Junos, hence it was requested to be removed from the configuration.

 

2). Customer has "nat-only" configured inside the SCTP profile.

user@router# show security sctp

profile sctp-profile-1 {

nat-only;

association-timeout 1440;

permit {

payload-protocol all;

 

Customer was suggested to remove nat-only option from the sctp profile, since nat-only option causes SCTP inspection not work.

Modification History

2025-09-25 : Article Created

2025-09-29 : Article published