At 14:18 +0000 6/10/12, Paul Vixie wrote:

thinking about or acting against ANY is bad infosec economics.

This I agree with.  Here are some of my knee-jerk, anti-filtering thoughts:

1 - DNS providers are paid to answer questions, not drop traffic.
2 - Rate limits that are not managed eventually become the reason why address blocks are contaminated. Recall the 512 byte limit devices. 3 - Whenever I've considered limiting any pattern I think of a few other patterns that could be substituted in short order if its an APT.

I agree that rate limiting is an effective short-term, immediate reaction to events. But once you leave that time horizon they become liabilities - "permanent fixes to temporary solutions."

Another part of this discussion centered around determining the source of the offensive traffic. Again, "bad infosec economics" comes here - while it is interesting to diagnose, rarely does the search for answers to this question lead to a permanent solution. We've collectively known about Dan Bernstein's use of t=ANY for a decade and we know he's reluctant to listen to calls for change nor make the change. 10+ years. Nothing's changed - except the newest younger crowd learns about this old tale.

The suggestion to limit EDNS0 to "a smaller size" might be the first step to decent (but still suboptimal) improvement. Guessing that the malicious data seeks two things - a large, valid and reputable chunk of data to throw at a victim and an reputable and capable address from which to throw it, perhaps at least limiting the data size in a way that does not cause choking to legitimate uses is a good thing.

I've said in presentations that the same fertile ground that lets DNS be the beast that it is also enables DDoS (rooted in the nature of UDP). The fact that we are still talking DDoS prevention many years after we started is empirical evidence that DDoS is a hard problem to solve. Rate limiting is one technique, not a cure-all. If it was, we'd not be talking about it in 2012. So, use it with caution.

PS - One possibility, instead of simply not responding, send back rcode=REFUSED.

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Edward Lewis
NeuStar                    You can leave a voice message at +1-571-434-5468

2012...time to reuse those 1984 calendars!
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