Re: Recent Attacks

From: Bennett Todd (betat_private)
Date: Wed Feb 16 2000 - 09:56:22 PST

  • Next message: David LeBlanc: "RE: mitigating the lack of a firewall"

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    I may be a cad and a barbarian, but I'm less concerned with
    identifying who's doing it, and more concerned with making the
    attacks harder to mount, and easier to stop.
    
    I very strongly believe that one step will do a great deal to reduce
    the severity of this problem (e.g., it would essentially stop the
    current tools, and make any replacements far, far less effective),
    and that's to make ingress filtering universal.
    
    While route-based packet filtering, to toss forged source addrs, is
    very hard if not impossible once the packet enters the core routers,
    when it's passing through the border router, the router that has a
    simple static route for the LAN the packet originated on, the
    filtering is trivial to implement. Some routers (e.g. Linux) can be
    switched to do it automatically, with no configuration changes
    necessary as the routing environment changes. I expect that will be
    a required feature in routers very quickly, and not long after that
    we'll start seeing blacklists, to help you block nets that don't do
    ingress filtering right at your routers.
    
    Allowing forged source addrs in and out of your nets is bad hygiene.
    
    And if DDoS attacks couldn't used forged source addrs, they couldn't
    use smurf to amplify their effects, and they couldn't be reused at
    all; the moment a victim starts capturing packets, they'd have the
    source addrs of all the machines in the attackers DDoS net --- and
    building those nets remains the relatively hard prep work for
    mounting one of these attacks. If we had universal ingress
    filtering, the moment someone started launching one of these the
    victim could start contacting the compromised sites, and if they
    refused to address their problem they could request that the streams
    by blocked by the compromised sites' providers.
    
    Right now, only some nets nets have ingress filtering --- those
    run by competant and knowlegeable networks admins who care about
    security. But I think it will not be long before running without
    ingress filtering is as unacceptable --- and gets you blacklisted as
    hard and fast --- as running an open relay email server.
    
    -Bennett
    
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