nanog mailing list archives

Re: DNS hardening, was Re: Dan Kaminsky


From: Douglas Otis <dotis () mail-abuse org>
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:53:32 -0700

On 8/5/09 2:49 PM, Christopher Morrow wrote:
and state-management seems like it won't be too much of a problem on
that dns server... wait, yes it will.

DNSSEC UDP will likely become problematic. This might be due to reflected attacks, fragmentation related congestion, or packet loss. When it does, TCP fallback will tried. TCP must retain state for every attempt to connect, and will require significantly greater resources for comparable levels of resilience.

SCTP instead uses cryptographic cookies and the client to retain this state information. SCTP can bundle several transactions into a common association, which reduces overhead and latency compared against TCP. SCTP ensures against source spoofed reflected attacks or related resource exhaustion. TCP or UDP does not. Under load, SCTP can redirect services without using anycast. TCP can not.

-Doug




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