nanog mailing list archives

Re: MD5 in BGP4


From: Danny McPherson <danny () tcb net>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 21:37:10 -0600




It's is a kind of useless things. If you allow spoofing.,
you are voluranable to the DoS attacks against BGP; if you 
are not, no need to use MD5 for BGP.

Actually, I can think of more than a few configurations
where this isn't true.  For example, shared-media exchange 
points where multiple networks reside on a single segment
and eBGP peer using the address of the segment.  The IP
network number is associated only with the interface, 
there's no individual hardware/IP address relationship 
relative to anti-spoofing here.

And DoS attack is the reality, not BGP spoofings (may be
 you know any such case? I do not know any).

Agreed, it's purpose is more so to protect against DoS
type stuff at the TCP layer.

For IS-IS and OSPF, just other matter. They are working 
over the LAN, and customers and internal users are often 
plugged into this network. So, authentication is necessary 
to prevent both errors and intrusions (and the anty-error 
measures are much more inmportant in such  networks).

However, I think we'd both agree that a configuration such 
as this (IGP being enabled on customer facing interfaces)
is ill-advised.

Just again, I know a lot of cases when IGP was broken
by error (someone installed new server and turned OSPF 
on), but I does not know any attacks of this kind (but 
I believe there are such cases for IGP protocols). Throgh,
to defent against such attacks originated from IGP, you
need a lot of things be used (non Redirect, static ARYP,
etc etc).

Agreed.

-danny




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