[Ndn-interest] Largest DDoS attack ever delivered by botnet of hijacked IoT devices

Marc.Mosko at parc.com Marc.Mosko at parc.com
Tue Sep 27 19:18:53 PDT 2016


Removing the PIT and using, for example, a label swapping approach such as J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves has suggested, does not remove the “signal” you talk about.  One could keep upstream and downstream counters for each label swap identifier and see which labels are not getting downstream data.

I do not think the strategy of purging PIT entries based on the shortness of their remaining lifetime gives you any correlation to purging attack packets.  First of all, an attacker could easily use a very large Interest Lifetime.  Well-behaved clients that are using RTT estimates in their Interest Lifetime would, by definition, likely have very small margins in the Interest Lifetime remaining  before the Data comes back (personally, I think it is a problem to make InterestLifetime based on RTT, but that’s a different thread).


Marc

> On Sep 28, 2016, at 10:47 AM, christopherwood07 at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> On September 27, 2016 at 5:14:14 PM, Christos Papadopoulos
> (christos at colostate.edu) wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On 09/27/2016 04:59 PM, woodc1 at uci.edu wrote:
>>> To re-iterate Cesar’s point, as of now, there is no truly effective
>>> interest flooding mitigation. However, one concrete way to minimize
>>> the attack surface (for routers) is to get rid of the attack's root
>>> cause: the PIT. (Producers could still be hosed with bogus interests.)
>>> And since the PIT enables several important functions, other
>>> architecture changes will probably have to follow in its wake.
>> 
>> You start with what I believe to be the wrong premise: protecting the
>> router. In NDN we care about communication, not a single router.
>> Protecting a router is winning the battle but losing the war.
> 
> I respectfully disagree. If the adversary takes out the producer,
> there is no communication. If the adversary takes out the routers
> adjacent or otherwise on the path to the producer, there is no
> communication. Protecting the router(s) is equally important,
> especially since it may impact more than just a single producer.
> 
>> 
>> I don't understand your statement that the root cause of DDoS attacks is
>> the PIT. The root cause of DDoS is resource exhaustion.
> 
> In these attack scenarios, the PIT *is* the resource being exhausted.
> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> Personally, I don’t think we should settle with an architectural
>>> element that has a known (and quite severe) weakness simply because it
>>> enables some nice features in practice. The more serious design
>>> problems must be dealt with first, not last.
>> 
>> You are underestimating the importance of the signal the PIT provides.
>> It is an important insight into the status of communication. The PIT
>> does not simply enable some "nice features". Think a bit harder about
>> the things you can do with this signal.
> 
> In most attack scenarios, yes, it tells you when bogus interests are
> flooding a particular prefix and otherwise when communication is
> failing. But consider this scenario. Suppose you have a malicious
> producer cooperating with one or more malicious consumers. The
> consumers are quickly sending interests to this legitimate producer,
> who responds with legitimate data. The communication is not failing.
> Their goal is to do nothing other than saturate the PIT of some
> intermediate router. Per Spyros’ follow-up suggestion, that router
> might kick out old, legitimate interests in favor of these malicious
> ones. Of course, this is fundamentally how we would expect one to deal
> with and manage a limited resource. So preventing this attack seems
> difficult for any approach. But the point is that this resource, the
> PIT, is easily abused in CCN/NDN.
> 
> Chris
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ndn-interest mailing list
> Ndn-interest at lists.cs.ucla.edu
> http://www.lists.cs.ucla.edu/mailman/listinfo/ndn-interest





More information about the Ndn-interest mailing list