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

[Christos Papadopoulos]

On 09/27/2016 04:59 PM, woodc1 at uci.edu wrote:
> On September 27, 2016 at 3:23:14 PM, Lixia Zhang (lixia at cs.ucla.edu) wrote:
>>> On Sep 27, 2016, at 1:49 PM, Cesar Ghali wrote:
>>>
>>> The PIT may very well serve a useful purpose in NDN/CCN. However, it creates well-known
>> security problems (interest flooding is trivial) and it’s highly doubtful that a deterministic
>> solution is possible.
>>
>> the discussion below is on how to effectively mitigate Interest flooding.
>> By removing PIT, one also removes a number of important functions enabled by PIT.
> 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 don't understand your statement that the root cause of DDoS attacks is 
the PIT. The root cause of DDoS is resource exhaustion.

>
> 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.

Christos.

>
> Chris