nanog mailing list archives

Re: BGP FlowSpec


From: Martin Bacher <ti14m028 () technikum-wien at>
Date: Tue, 3 May 2016 00:21:56 +0200


Am 02.05.2016 um 23:51 schrieb jim deleskie <deleskie () gmail com>:

I was going to avoid this thread because I've never been a huge fan of
Flowspec for my own reasons. However having work on /been responsible for
several "Tier 1 and 2" networks and DDoS mitigation services over the last
20 years,  I can say I, nor any of my peers ( in any sense of that word)
that I have known, have wanted to keep "bad " traffic on our networks so
we can bill for it.  Designing and running a large network is hard enough
with planed growth, without having to manage unplanned spikes on links that
can be  orders of magnitude larger then traffic that "normally" flows
across it.
I was for sure not precise enough in my statement and should have left out the money part. Sorry for that. An ISP would 
of course protect its own infrastructure and other customers if the attack is large enough and always tries to keep the 
general impact as low as possible. But auto mitigation is usually only provided for customers which are paying for it. 
BGP-FS offers an easy way for automatic deployment of traffic remarking of attack traffic in order to keep the overall 
impact for the own network and other customers at a very low level.

On top of that any given DDoS attack seldom last long enough to materially
impact 95%ile billing, so carriers don't make anything from it, but have to
do all the work of moving it around.

-jim

On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 6:38 PM, Roland Dobbins <rdobbins () arbor net> wrote:

On 2 May 2016, at 20:16, Martin Bacher wrote:

However, Tier 1s and most probably also some of the Tier 2s may not want
to offer it to customers because they are loosing money if less traffic is
sent downstream on IP-Transit links.


I will go a step further than Danny's comments and state that this is
categorically and demonstrably untrue.

Many of the quite large 'Tier-1' and 'Tier-2' (using the old terminology)
operators on this list offer commercial DDoS mitigation services making use
of technologies like D/RTBH, S/RTBH, IDMS, et. al. due to customer demand.
They need these capabilities in order to defend their own properties and
assets, and they are also offering them to end-customers who want and need
them.

In point of fact, it's becoming difficult to find one which *doesn't*
offer this type of service.

There were a couple of situations in the first half of the first decade of
this millennium where operators took this attitude.  But they changed their
tunes pretty rapidly once they themselves were impacted, and once they
started losing customers because they couldn't and wouldn't protect them.

And as Danny notes, these technologies are all tools in the toolbox.  NFV
and 'SDN' have tremendous potential to make it a lot easier to bring
mitigation resources to bear in a dynamic and optimal fashion within single
spans of administrative control; and there are standards-based efforts
underway to provide for a higher degree of automation, increased rapidity
of response, and interoperability in both inter- and intra-network DDoS
mitigation scenarios.

-----------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins () arbor net>



Current thread: