nanog mailing list archives

Re: peering requirements (Re: DDOS anecdotes)


From: Randy Bush <randy () psg com>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 14:41:53 -0700


there are people now reading these words who are not exactly polite
members of internet society.

i suspect that many people would number you and me among them.  but
that's why we have .procmailrc and the delete key.

i think you're assuming a lot.  it's not socially reasonable.  there
are US network owners whose peering policies are set based on fear of
the justice department rather than on any solid economic or engineering
basis.

i suspect that some larger isps see a connection between doj actions and
economic impact.  ask mci old-timers.  ask bernie ebers.

my simple-minded approach to thinking about this is about interface ingress
filtering.  an interface or subinterface or link or whatever you want to call
it on one of your routers is ingressing one of three kinds of traffic:

      1. from a customer (not your network)
      2. from a peer (not your network)
      3. from some other router you own

if all your routers handle #1 and #2 consistently and well, then #3 doesn't
matter.  (filtering by trusted proxy.)  if you limit each #1 to a specific
set of source addresses (which limits performance but CAN be done, even on
very slow, or very fast, and/or very dense connections), and if by peering
agreement you limit #2 (back to filtering by trusted proxy) then you're DONE
implementing it (randy's first point, above).

i am told that a well-known and still somewhat popular router vendor
handles source filtering on the slow path, and can't handle aggregated
high loads.

is the acl for large peers 2 known and loadable into routers?  i am not
comfortable with the assumption that my peer must have similar agreements
with all their peers.  heck, if i did, then, aside from the business
issues (you gonna force att/cw/sprint/uu/... how to coduct their peering
policy?) how does all this bootstrap?

making #2 transitive is the big problem.  let's say that woody's got
some really old peering agreement in place with some provider who
doesn't mind leaving the session up but would almost certainly not be
willing/able to set it up afresh starting today.  will woody drop
peering with that provider if they refuse to agree to limit spoofage?
Certainly Not.  probably some very large/old networks could simply drag
their feet about agreeing to limit their spoofage, and thus
transitively make all "upgraded" peering agreements thereby toothless.
(would i drop peering with woody just because he refused to drop it
with some old/large network who refused to control their spoofage
emission?  Probably Not.)

yup.  that's a real problem.

so we have two problems with this
  o we can't tell big peers how to conduct their business
  o source filtering at high bandwidth

how do we make progress on these?

the angry teenager with a $300 openbsd machine apparently has nothing to
fear from us.

some of them are in jail.  and there are some interesting anti-ddos
tecnology developments in the works.  not to belittle the problem.

randy


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