nanog mailing list archives

Re: Effective ways to deal with DDoS attacks?


From: "Christopher L. Morrow" <chris () UU NET>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 21:43:10 +0000 (GMT)



On Tue, 7 May 2002 vern () ee lbl gov wrote:


It seems to me that the real issue in defending against an attack of this
type of differentiating between legitimate traffic and zombie traffic.

Exactly.  And while with today's DDoS attacks this is often not so hard,
tomorrow's floods will be more carefully crafted so that there are no
telltales that can be cheaply used to filter them out.

Steve Bellovin and colleagues (me being one of them) have been working on
a scheme called "Pushback", in which routers detect traffic aggregates
that are burdening one of their links, and send pushback messages upstream
to their peers responsible for the bulk of the traffic, asking them to
rate-limit the aggregates.  The key idea is that the upstream peers then

1) rate-limits aren't going to solve anything.
2) I'm pretty sure most providers aren't going to let customers determine
traffic engineering methods on their networks
3) if this is NOT done in a secure manner I bet I can make
www.whitehouse.com disappear... :)

-Chris


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