[4752] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: syn attack and source routing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Fri Sep 27 17:28:02 1996
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 14:18:58 -0700
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@quake.net>
To: alexis@panix.com, paul@vix.com
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Alexis Rosen <alexis@panix.com> wrote:
> > Or better yet, the ICMP TRACEROUTE message, which would go
> > hop by hop and on every hop generates a response message.
> > Augmented with PROXY TRACEROUTE which will cause the destination
> > box to send out the ICMP TRACEROUTE.
>I'm very surprised that noone has mentioned what seems to me to be the
>*really* serious drawback to this scheme. Remember how much grief you had
>the last time someone did a news sendsys forged to your name? (If it's
>never happened to you, be glad...) This sort of attack got so bad that
>the default setup these days is to ignore sendsys.
Yes, indeed a single traceroute packet with forged address can generate
many responses. However, there is at least one technique to eliminate
its usefulness as an attack weapon -- namely source address filtering
(which is going to be implemented anyway, sooner or later; there are
other types of attacks).
Another way is to have ICMP TRACEROUTE to return one packet with all
information _and_ the IP address of the next hop router (i.e. replace
recursive behaviour with iterative) . It is still more useful than
UDP kludge; and it will still work in case of load-sharing.
Actually, the "multiplication" type of flooding attacks is nothing
new, but they are more easily done on application level. For example,
connecting to different SNMP speakers and causing them to send a long
error reply to the target address. Or subscribing victim to many many
mailing lists (including USENET gateways, urgh!). Or using MBONE
feeds creatively.
--vadim