North American Network Operators Group
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Re: md5 for bgp tcp sessions

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Thu Jun 23 00:34:42 2005 
On Jun 23, 2005, at 12:14 AM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
Just please realize that this is a trivial layer of security, an extra
little bit of insurance to make it harder to alter the packets in flight
or screw with the delivery protocol, and as such the key is not a state
secret. I am going to seriously hurt the next person who wants to exchange
phone numbers via pgp encrypted email so that we can have a conference
call to set up a meeting where we can whisper MD5 keys to each other in
pig latin while standing under the god damned cone of silence and then
shoot the engineers who configured it on the router afterwards.
It's not just trivial, it's nearly useless.

Would someone please raise their hand if they have ever seen this attack in the wild? Anyone?

Seems the TTL hack is much more effective at guarding against this sort of thing, doesn't require "secrets", far less CPU intensive, easier to configure, etc., etc., etc.

Want security? I suggest you use something that has more benefit than cost.

--
TTFN,
patrick