Firewall Wizards mailing list archives

Re: client puzzle protocol


From: Antonomasia <ant () notatla demon co uk>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 21:59:57 GMT

"Michael B. Rash" <mbr () math umd edu>:

scheme any different?  The server still must maintain state for each
connection request to know if any subseqent response solved the crypto
puzzle correctly... hence we can DoS such a server in exactly the same way
as the normal SYN flood; by maxing out this state table.

This might be avoided by something like "An option-based implementation
of SYN cookies?" proposed here in December by Mikael Olsson
<mikael.olsson () enternet se>.

                                                          In addition,
even if there were a server-side limit on the number of connection
requests made by a single client (which RSA does not seem to do) it would
be easy to spoof packets from *many* different IP's in the same manner as
the DDoS attacks and so this would be useless too.

It may prevent spoofing, but I think massive parallel puzzling by large
numbers of zombies with genuine unwanted connections will beat this and
anything else of the kind.

--
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# Antonomasia   ant () notatla demon co uk                      #
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