Owen DeLong writes:
I will also point out that many of the recent "smurf" attacks and similar problems people are having on the net would be gone if people would just carefully filter internal/external addresses on their border machines, that is, prevent packets claiming to be from "inside" networks from coming in from the "outside", and prevent packets claiming to be from "outside" networks from going out from the "inside". The latter will stop your network from *ever* being the source of a wide variety of packet forgery attacks, and is necessary to being a good network citizen. The former will stop your network from being the subject of a wide variety fo packet forgery attacks, and is necessary to make your customers even remotely safe on the net.
That's great if you're a downstream provider with no transit customers. However, when you become a transit provider,
OF COURSE this is mainly a "leaf network" thing, not a thing for transit networks. Large providers serving "leaf networks" with well defined connection points to them *can* do some filtering -- in particular, they can refuse to pass packets to a network claiming to originate from within it, and they can refuse to accept packets from a network claiming not to come from within it. That is not, of course, the true transit network case. Extensive filtering *will* reduce the denial of service attacks of this sort we are getting. They can never eliminate them, but they *will* help. I cannot urge strongly enough that people start implementing this sort of filtering as soon as possible. Perry