On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:09:56AM -0400, Wendy Roome wrote:
> Seems to me that if the "bad guys" can subvert DHCP and DNS servers,
> they've already taken over the network. Why would they bother spoofing an
> ALTO server?

for the P2P use case you are probably right - if you control DNS you can
probably do much cooler things than pessimize P2P traffic patterns.

on the other hand, you could subert DNS, change as little as possible
hoping it remains undetected, but spoof the ALTO server in order to turn
a large P2P network in a DDoS infrastructure. OK, maybe this is a bit
silly ...

... on the other hand we should really care about security in our base
protocol. There is more than just the P2P use case, look at the various
proposed extensions and think of use cases that didn't even come to
our minds yet. Furhermore it is in general a good practice to have
several lines of defense. Attacks against DNS and DHCP get less
interesting if every applications (including the presumably "boring"
ones) can detect spoofing. Adding this detection mechanisms may be
easier than making DNS and DHCP secure in the first place.

Thanks
Sebastian
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