North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Telco's write best practices for packet switching networks

  • From: Ratul Mahajan
  • Date: Tue Mar 12 15:26:31 2002

> On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Jake Khuon wrote:
> > There were workable solutions even back then.  I think we all just chose the
> > path of least resistance because it was easier and the risk factours were
> > perceived to be low.  We all know that was a false assumption.  I remember
> > the first smurf attack against mae-east and how it knocked out quite a few
> > peers.
> 
> Yep, I understand.  History is never as neat as we would like.  It
> may have been suitable in the past.  Is it time to change?
> 
> I'm not suggesting RFC1918 space for internal backbone routers and IXPs,
> but not announcing your internal-only nets would (slightly) increase the
> difficulty of attacking the core.  It doesn't even require ISPs to agree
> on a best practice.  A provider can choose to  implement it themselves
> to protect their own core network.
> 
> Perhaps the attacks on core routers aren't bad enough to justify such
> a drastic step yet.  I get conflicting signals from engineers still
> working.  Some say they see attacks all the time, others say they've
> never seen one on their core routers.

On the downside -- this is yet another instance of conflict between
research and operations.  Being able to address the (core) routers
directly is an important capability researchers use for tasks like
topology discovery and path/routing characterization. Of course, if 
researchers can talk to the routers, so can the attackers .....

	-- Ratul