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Re: SYN flood messages flooding my mailbox

  • From: Vadim Antonov
  • Date: Thu Sep 19 23:39:54 1996

Curtis Villamizar <[email protected]> wrote:

>> If you relax criteria for reverse-route filtering to "known route" instead
>> of "best route" then any customer (non-transit) AS can be filtered safely
>> at border routers.

>And if the "known route" is know by another router but suppressed from
>IBGP advertisement because there is a better route ..

But you still have the exterior route in the RIB.  So you know it.

I'm talking about filtering on borders, not within backbones utilizing
the BGP hack.

>Or if the "known route" goes through an AS that uses YOU as their best
>route but the reverse traffic goes a different way..

So what?  The assumption is that multi-homed AS announces all its
routes to all exits (maybe with different "metrics").

Is there any practical example of _properly configured_ multihomed
non-transit AS which advertises more routes at one exit than another?

>Both of these cases and other cause a blackhole.

Not at all.

>Of course, if by "known route" you mean known because it is in the
>IRR, and the IRR is known to be reliable, then I accept your argument
>but caution that the IRR is not always reliable, but this is yet
>another reason to make it more reliable.

IRR.  I always held an opinion that the kludge got to die as soon
as somebody comes with real way to authenticate routing information.
It is silly to build centralized databases for anything.  They by
definition cannot be reliable.  (Note that address allocation does not
have to be centralized -- in fact, TWD is the direct result of such
centralization).

>We've had providers shut down sites because they were slow to address
>hacking launched from their site...

Do you enjoy playing a cop?  I don't.  To me, the real solution is
to make sure attacks are not feasible in the first place.  Or at
least make sure that the victim can easily obtain the identity of
perpetrator and pursue the legal action on his own.

ISPs are not in business of catching criminals.  Their business is
to deliver bits.

>In one case an NSFNET regional shut
>down a large university because their CS department just said
>"security is a hard problem" and refused to do anything.  After 4 days
>of no Internet access they had things quite thoroughly cleaned up.

The times of the Big Bro^H^H^HNSFNET are long gone.  Good riddance, i
certainly have no nostalgia.

If people want to have no locks on their doors it is certainly completely
within their rights, ok?

>Shutting down the source is a lot easier if you know the source.

I do not want to shut down anyone, if possible.  Internet made a
very good device to support right of speach.  Now the question is
how to equip it to provide the right not to listen.

The authentication is very instrumental to enforce the right not
to listen.  At least, then you can explicitly say: "I don't want to
listen to anything from such and such".

Essentially, source address filtering is the non-cryptographic form
of authentication.  In reality approach like that works surprisingly
well.

--vadim
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