Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-irtf-routing-reqs-groupa-00.txt

From: Kastenholz, Frank (FKastenholz@unispherenetworks.com)
Date: Tue Apr 09 2002 - 13:41:46 EDT


At 11:01 AM 4/9/02 -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>Looking at the security section of the document, in the "no bad data"
portion, you list three "threats":
> o Directing legitimate traffic away from a target, causing
> a denial-of-service attack by preventing legitimate data
> from reaching its destination,
> o Directing additional traffic (going to other
> destinations which are 'innocent bystanders') to a
> target, causing the target to be overloaded, or
> o Directing traffic addressed to the target to a place
> where the attacker can copy, snoop, alter, or otherwise
> affect the traffic.
>
>I understand the first two. I think I am missing the point of the third.
There seem to be two kinds of problems it might be addressing. One problem
is where the snooper could be dropping all the packets, so must be prevented
according to the first bullet. The other problem would be someone who is
forwarding the traffic towards the destination, but snooping in passing. I
do not understand how the routing system could worry about that. From a
routing perspective it looks (I think) indistinguishable from a legitimate
transit provider. The two ways I know of to approach the problem are policy
(a separate element) and end-to-end information hiding (again a separate
element).
>Can someone give me an example of what might be meant by the third bullet
that is not covered by the first two bullets.
>(Note: I am not trying to question whether the first two are achievable.
That is a separate question.)

Joel

Your understanding of the third item is correct.
Whether it is solvable is, of course, another issue.
But at least this gets people thinking...

Frank Kastenholz

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