Re: Blackholes and IXs and Completing the Attack.

From: Danny McPherson (no email)
Date: Sat Feb 02 2008 - 15:49:12 EST

  • Next message: Christopher Morrow: "Re: Blackholes and IXs and Completing the Attack."

    On Feb 2, 2008, at 1:16 PM, Ben Butler wrote:
    >
    > So, given we all now understand each other - why is no one doing the
    > above?

    Some folks are doing this, just not via some third-party
    route servers. For example, either via customer peering
    sessions, or other BGP interconnections between peers.
    E.g.:

    http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0402/morrow.html

    I'm not sure it's ideal to employ third-party route servers
    for this purpose, as it only increases the attacks/error
    surface. I suppose if folks rely on it for native peering
    then it might be reasonable.

    > At the end of the day if an IX member doesn't want the announcements
    > don't peer with the blackhole reflector, simple, and it will get Null
    > routed as soon as it hits my edge router at the IX - it would just
    > seem
    > more sensible to enable people to block the traffic before it
    > traverses
    > the IX and further back in their own networks.

    Yes, helping to ease effects of collateral damage from
    large-scale attacks by conveying drop policies to upstream
    ASes for prefixes which you originate. And perhaps as
    significant, being able to allow the target AS to remove
    those policies dynamically, rather than having to contact
    each upstream AS that appears to have imposed them
    manually out-of-band.

    I think Paul's comments were more regarding the fact
    that destination-based blackhole routing for mitigation
    *effectively completes the attack*, which is often times
    undesirable. Inter-domain source-based blackhole
    routing is pretty much a non-option.

    One other offshoot is that advertised more-specifics
    are going to further contribute to routing AND forwarding
    table bloat, and a single new prefixes might result in
    10+ new paths in the iBGP RIBs.

    If you do implement something like this you may wish to
    scope advertisement only to adjacent ASes via
    NO_EXPORT or the like, to scope both more-specific
    propagation, and to ensure that some lack of consistent
    drop community semantic interpretation doesn't hose
    something.

    Also, if you impose this as a standard attack response
    mechanism recall that you lose visibility of attack scales,
    and knowing just when to resume normal forwarding
    policies is a bit more complex. As such, your policy sets
    may want to provide hooks that enable selective prefix
    advertise/withdraw drop policies so that it can be applied
    or removed incrementally.

    -danny


  • Next message: Christopher Morrow: "Re: Blackholes and IXs and Completing the Attack."





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