I wish that it were not so, but after reading the clever and insightful
approaches to tracking down the denial-of-service perps, I am pessimistic
about our ability to stay ahead in the escalation of this counter-counter-
measure warfare. I think that if we were able to trace the Panix attacker
that a future attacker would hit simultaneously from a half-dozen free
dial-up connections with a real random number generator and synthetic
SYNs to fool the router stat collector (or whatever it takes). I think we
are on the short end of the technology stick here.
If the fit hits the shan and the attacks begin to escalate, we need to be
ready to cooperate on source address filtering at the periphery. It's one
of those cases of hang together or hang separately. Should we wait, like
the cell phone industry did with the cloning fiasco, until this gives us
a black eye? It's just too inviting to expect that we don't have plenty of
folks out there ready to pull this trigger on us.
We need a general consensus in order for any one of us to justify the effort
required to install source address filters. That means that representatives
from major backbone ISPs must announce that they will install filters (not
at the MAEs) in response to this new threat and that they expect that their
peers will too. I'm not one of those major backbone ISP network
engineers, but I would hope that for the sake of all of us, that those who
are will roll their eyes heavenward, take a deep breath, and do what needs
to be done. I know it's easy for me to say, but nevertheless ...
This is an excellent example of what the NANOG and IEPG are really good for.
--Kent