Re: That pesky AS path corruption bug...

[Adrian Chadd <adrian () creative net au>]

On Wed, May 24, 2000, John Fraizer wrote:
> On 23 May 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 23 May 2000, Jeff Haas wrote:
> > > The only valid defense against such mucking that I can think of
> > > is verifying AS adjacencies against some registry and flagging
> > > unknown paths.  This is not a cheap thing to do.  This, however,
> > > is far saner than cryptographically signing all routing updates
> > > which is one solution I've heard proposed. :-P
> >
> > You can cryptographically sign bad information as well as good
> > information.  Cryptography is good for detecting alterations, not
> > if the information was correct in the first place.
>
> Ahhh... But, if the router is sufficiently confused to be screwing up the
> update, it will quite possibly be too confused to successfully sign the
> update and it will fail authentication when the peer receives it.

Assuming that because the router is partially broken ensures its fully
broken will come back and bite you very very hard. :)

Cryptographically signing here ensures someone isn't going to tamper
with your route announcements in transit. When script kiddies have the
technology to splice fibre cabes in their backyard and sniff/replace
data at line speed, I'm sure they will have more fun things to do than
mess with your BGP session.



Adrian


-- 
Adrian Chadd                    Build a man a fire, and he's warm for the
<adrian () creative net au>     rest of the evening. Set a man on fire and
                                he's warm for the rest of his life.