nanog mailing list archives

Re: New Denial of Service Attack on Panix


From: dvv () sprint net (Dima Volodin)
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 17:51:34 -0400 (EDT)

Well, my understanding of your idea was that you proposed to detect SYN
packets with unroutable src addresses before they hit the SYN_RCVD
queue. The only way to deem them unroutable is to observe
ICMP_UNREACHs hitting the box in large numbers. Now my first paragraph
just means that an SRC address might be a perfectly routable one without
its being real - an unused address on an ethernet segment is enough for
the attack. Or thousands of them for an untraceable attack.


Dima

Tim Bass writes:


It will, except that a slight modification of the attack (using IP
addresses that _don't_ produce ICMP_UNREACH) will get us back to square
one.

Anyway, filtering packets with SRC addresses known to generate
ICMP_UNREACH at the earliest possible stage might be a good idea.

I understand paragraph two, but about paragraph 1....

When I ran the TCP SYN attack using routable source addresses,
before I patched my attack kernel to allow Spoofers, I
literally beat-to-death a server on the same subnet and
the attack has no effect.  

However, when I hacked the kernel to allow spoofed addresses,
the attack was severe and immediate.  So, from my tests,
the attack is only sucessful when the bogus source address
is UNREACHABLE (which is a defense in the non-random
attack.

For clarity, the attack only works when the IP source address
is UNREACHABLE, this has been my observation here in the lab using
an source address from my net (however I haven't confirmed this
with a good source address in another domain but I will...)



Tim



Tim

Dima




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