RE: Is AS information useful for security?

[Drew Weaver <drew.weaver () thenap com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Justin M. Streiner [mailto:streiner () cluebyfour org] 
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 9:45 AM
To: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Is AS information useful for security?

> origin-AS could be another story.  If you know of an AS that is being used by the bad guys for bad purposes, you can 
> write a routing policy to dump all traffic to/from that AS into the bit bucket or take some other action that could be 
> dictated by your security policy.  In that case, a routing policy could be >considered an extension of a security 
> policy.

I could be wrong here but I believe origin-AS uses a lookup from the routing table to figure out what the originAS for 
the source IP should be (and not what it explicitly IS) which means the information is unreliable.

For example if someone is sending spoofed packets towards you the origin AS will always show up as the originator of 
the real route instead of the origin AS of the actual traffic.

This is why it would be useful to have the originAS (from the actual origin) in the packet header.

Thanks,
-Drew