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Date: 2000-02-16
Schneier über DDoS-Attacken-.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- Aussage und mit viel Wissen rund um die Techno-Historie ausgestatet, ist Bruce Schneiers monatliche Analyse, die diesmal klar/erweise den Distributed Denial of Services Attacken auf yahoo und andere gilt. -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- relayed vom Autor B.S. der hier zu Hause ist: http://www.counterpane.com -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- Suddenly, distributed denial-of-service (DDS) attacks are big news. The first automatic tools for these attacks were released last year, and CERT sent out an advisory in November. But the spate of high-profile attacks in mid- February has put them on the front pages of newspapers everywhere. Not much is new. Denial-of-service attacks have been going on for years. The recent attacks are the same, only this time there is no single source of the attack. We've seen these for years, too. The attacker first breaks into hundreds or thousands of random insecure computers (called "zombies") on the Internet and installs an attack program. Then he coordinates them all to attack the target at the same time. The target is attacked from many places at once; his traditional defenses just don't work, and he falls over dead. It's very much like the pizza delivery attack: Alice doesn't like Bob, so she calls a hundred pizza delivery parlors and, from each one, has a pizza delivered to Bob's house at 11:00 PM. At 11, Bob's front porch is filled with 100 pizza deliverers, all demanding their money. It looks to Bob like the pizza Mafia is out to get him, but the pizza parlors are victims too. The real attacker is nowhere to be seen. This sounds like a complicated attack on the Internet, and it is. But unfortunately, it only takes one talented programmer with a poor sense of ethics to automate and distribute the attacks. Once a DDS tool is publicly available, an attacker doesn't need skill; he can use a simple point-and-click interface to infect the intermediate sites, as well as to coordinate and launch the attack. This is what's new: easy- to-use DDS tools like Trin00 and Tribal Flood Network. These attacks are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to defend against. In a traditional denial-of-service attack, the victim computer might be able to figure out where the attack is coming from and shut down those connections. But in a distributed attack, there is no single source. The computer should shut down all connections except for the ones it knows to be trusted, but that doesn't work for a public Internet site. Other defenses also have problems. I've seen proposals that force the client to perform an expensive calculation to make a connection. (RSA pre-announced such a "solution.") This works against standard denial-of-service attacks, but not against a distributed one. Large-scale filtering at the ISPs can help, but that requires a lot of effort and will reduce network bandwidth noticeably. At least one report has suggested that a lack of authentication on the Internet is to blame. This makes no sense. The packets did harm just by the attempt to deliver them; whether or not they were authenticatable is completely irrelevant. Mandatory authentication would do nothing to prevent these attacks, or to track down the attackers. There have been two academic conferences on DDS attacks in recent weeks, and the general consensus is that there is no way to defend against these attacks. Sometimes the particular bugs exploited in the DDS attacks can be patched, but there are many that cannot. The Internet was not designed to withstand DDS attacks. Tracing the attacker is also incredibly difficult. Going back to the pizza delivery example, the only thing the victim could do is to ask the pizza parlors to help him catch the attacker. If all the parlors coordinated their phone logs, maybe they could figure out who ordered all the pizzas in the first place. Something similar is possible on the Internet, but it is unlikely that the intermediate sites kept good logs. Additionally, it is easy to disguise your location on the Internet. And if the attacker is in some Eastern European country with minimal computer crime laws, a bribable police, and no extradition treaties, there's nothing you can do anyway. So far, these attacks are strictly denial-of-service. They do not affect the data on the Web sites. These attacks cannot steal credit card numbers or proprietary information. They cannot transfer money out of your bank account to trade stocks in your name. Attackers cannot gain financially from these attacks. Still, they are very serious. And it is certainly possible that an attacker can use denial of service as a tool for a more complicated attack that IS designed to steal something. This is not to say that denial-of-service attacks are not real, or not important. For most big corporations, the biggest risk of a security breach is loss of income or loss of reputation, either of which is achieved by a conspicuous denial-of-service attack. And for companies with more mission- or life-critical data online, a DOS attack can literally put a person's life at risk. The real problem is that there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of innocent naive computer users who are vulnerable to attack. They're using DSL or cable modems, they're always on the Internet with static IP addresses, and they can be taken over and used as launching pads for these (and other) attacks. The media is focusing on the mega e- corporations that are under attack, but the real story is the individual systems. Similarly, the real solutions are of the "civic hygiene" variety. Just as malaria was defeated in Washington, DC, by draining all the swamps, the only real way to prevent these attacks is to protect those millions of individual computers on the Internet. Unfortunately, we are building swampland at an incredible rate, and securing everything is impracticable. Even if personal firewalls had a 95% market penetration, and even if they were all installed and operated perfectly, there would still be enough insecure computers on the Internet to use for these attacks. I believe that any long-term solution will involve redesigning the entire Internet. Back in the 1960s, some people figured out that you could whistle, click, belch, or whatever into a telephone and make the system do things. This was the era of phone phreaking: black boxes, blue boxes, Captain Crunch whistles. The phone company did their best to defend against these attacks, but the basic problem was that the phone system was built with "in-band signaling": the control signal and the data signal traveled along the same wires. In the 1980s, the phone company completely redesigned the phone system. For example SS7, or Signaling System 7, was out-of-band. The voice path and data path were separated. Now it doesn't matter how hard you whistle into the phone system: the switch isn't listening. The attacks simply don't work. (Red boxes still work, against payphones, by mimicking the in-band tones that count the coins deposited in the phones.) In the long term, out-of-band signaling is the only way to deal with many of the vulnerabilities of the Internet, DDS attacks among them. Unfortunately, there are no plans to redesign the Internet in this way, and any such undertaking might be just too complicated to even consider. Discussion of DDS attacks: <http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/talks/cert/> CERT Advisory: <http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-99- 07.html> Tool to check if Tribal Flood Network or Trin00 is installed on your computer: <http://www.nfr.net/updates/> Tutorial on DOS attacks: <http://www.hackernews.com/bufferoverflow/00/dosattack/dos attack.html> Trin00 Analysis: <http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/trinoo.analysis> Tribal Flood Network Analysis: <http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/tfn.analysis> Stacheldraht Analysis: <http://staff.washington.edu/dittrich/misc/stacheldraht.analysi s> Declan McCullagh's essay on the topic: <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,34294,00.html> -.- -.-. --.- Heraus zum Linux Demo Day am 17. Februar in Linz [AT] http://www.quintessenz.at -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. Wer schon einmal aufgestanden ist, soll sich jetzt widersetzen. http://o5.or.at -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- edited by Harkank published on: 2000-02-16 comments to [email protected] subscribe Newsletter - -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- -.-. --.- 
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