Curtis Villamizar wrote:
Not at all. LSRR is a nice tool to mount practically untraceable flooding attack (hint -- just forge source address and spread intermediate points evenly across the network). Shutting you down may be exactly what the attacker wants.
Oh come on. Like they're not going to get caught stuffing an entire T1 with LSRR packets. Face it. You're grabbing at straws.
Ugh. To kill multiple DS-3s you don't even need a full T-1 (you need one LS address for every loop), and you can kill multiple DS-3s and an IXP to boot, with the single stream of bogons routed in a loop with many hops. And there's a lot of big name Us with DS-3 connectivity and no security whatsoever. Now, throw in randomized first hop and forged source address, and i'll wish you good luck catching the perpetrator. A careful attacker would also randomize destinations and make it to look like regular TCP traffic. (And did anybody think of IP stacks which reverse the source routes, just to make things funnier).
Besides the fact that with your suggestion of traceroute using ICMP echo requests they'd just send a T1s worth of ICMP echo requests with LSRR and accomplish the same thing.
Ok, with only one intermediate point allowed. _That_ should take care of all diagnostic needs.
LSRR is just too useful for diagnosing network problems to shut down on a backbone.
I sometimes wonder if the threat of hackers is exaggregated. They certainly missed a nice opportunity to crash the Internet with TCP resets on iBGPs. Now nobody cares about the creative potential of LSRR-anonymized denial of service attacks. They must be stupid or something. Should i write a backbone-crasher and post it to USENET just to make a point about LSRRs? Note that a provider which won't shut LSRR will be the threat to others... --vadim
On Thu, 22 Aug 1996, Vadim Antonov wrote:
I sometimes wonder if the threat of hackers is exaggregated. They certainly missed a nice opportunity to crash the Internet with TCP resets on iBGPs. Now nobody cares about the creative potential of LSRR-anonymized denial of service attacks. They must be stupid or something.
No. They just can't see the forest for the trees. In other words, hackers focus on the hosts not on the network infrastructure. And since they depend on the network to carry their attacks to their hosts of interest they don't have much incentive to attack the net itself. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
In message <199608230522.WAA02453@quest.quake.net>, Vadim Antonov writes:
Should i write a backbone-crasher and post it to USENET just to make a point about LSRRs? Note that a provider which won't shut LSRR will be the threat to others...
--vadim
Are we try to discuss how useful or dangerous LSRR is or is this another pissing war? Curtis ps- traceback capabilities for random source address attacks are possible if you normally log stats on src/dst pairs. Details and any further security discussion has been moved to a private conversation.
participants (3)
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Curtis Villamizar -
Michael Dillon -
Vadim Antonov