On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:16:16 -0500 "Anton Kapela" <tkapela@gmail.com> wrote:
I thought I'd toss in a few comments, considering it's my fault that few people are understanding this thing yet.
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Gadi Evron <ge@linuxbox.org> wrote:
People (especially spammers) have been hijacking networks for a while
I'd like to 'clear the air' here. Clearly, I failed at Defcon, WIRED, AFP, and Forbes.
We all know sub-prefix hijacking is not news. What is news? Using as-path loop detection to selectively blackhole the hijacked route - which creates a transport path _back to_ the target.
That's all it is, nothing more. All but the WIRED follow-up article missed this point *completely.* They over-represented the 'hijacking' aspects, while only making mention of the 'interception' potential.
Lets end this thread with the point I had intended two weeks ago: we've presented a method by which all the theory spewed by academics can be actualized in a real network (the big-I internet) to effect interception of data between (nearly) arbitrary endpoints from (nearly) any edge or stub AS. That, I think, is interesting.
Indeed, and I thank you for it. As noted, I and others have been warning about the problem for a long time. You've shown that it isn't just an ivory tower exercise; maybe people will now get serious about deploying a solution. To quote Bruce Schneier quoting an NSA maxim, attacks only get better; they never get worse. We now have running code of one way to do this. I think most NANOG readers can see many more ways to do it. A real solution will take years to deploy, but it will never happen if we don't start. And we want to have the solution out there *before* we see serious attacks on BGP. Again, thank you -- it was really nice work. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb