Re: New Denial of Service Attack on Panix

[Guy T Almes <almes () advanced org>]

Kent,
  I liked the rest of your message more than the first sentence.

  I agree that this will be hard to accomplish.  The key point, one that
I hope everyone on the NANOG and IEPG lists take to heart, is your 200-
year-old phrase that we will surely "hang together or hang separately".
The Panix attack undercuts every enterprise that attempts to promise to
users that they will be able to use the Internet to get their work done.

  I hope that users, providers, and vendors will cooperate on moving
forward on all three of:
        - source address filtering near the edges of the network
        - improved TCP software in the hosts
        - improved technology and operational routines for tracing attacks.
If one of these three thrusts is inconvenient to your part of the Internet,
don't take much comfort in assuming that the problem will be solved by
everyone making dramatic progress on the other two.

        -- Guy

At 01:42 PM 9/17/96 -0700, Kent W. England wrote:
> At 11:02 AM 9/17/96 -0400, Guy T Almes wrote:
> > Nathan,
> >  I'm afraid that Kent is right about this one.
> I wish that it were not so, but after reading the clever and insightful
> approaches to tracking down the denial-of-service perps, I am pessimistic
> about our ability to stay ahead in the escalation of this counter-counter-
> measure warfare. I think that if we were able to trace the Panix attacker
> that a future attacker would hit simultaneously from a half-dozen free
> dial-up connections with a real random number generator and synthetic
> SYNs to fool the router stat collector (or whatever it takes). I think we 
> are on the short end of the technology stick here.
>
> If the fit hits the shan and the attacks begin to escalate, we need to be 
> ready to cooperate on source address filtering at the periphery. It's one 
> of those cases of hang together or hang separately. Should we wait, like 
> the cell phone industry did with the cloning fiasco, until this gives us 
> a black eye? It's just too inviting to expect that we don't have plenty of
> folks out there ready to pull this trigger on us.
>
> We need a general consensus in order for any one of us to justify the effort
> required to install source address filters. That means that representatives
> from major backbone ISPs must announce that they will install filters (not 
> at the MAEs) in response to this new threat and that they expect that their 
> peers will too. I'm not one of those major backbone ISP network 
> engineers, but I would hope that for the sake of all of us, that those who 
> are will roll their eyes heavenward, take a deep breath, and do what needs 
> to be done. I know it's easy for me to say, but nevertheless ...
>
> This is an excellent example of what the NANOG and IEPG are really good for.
>
> --Kent

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