On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 9:12 AM, Dino Farinacci <[email protected]> wrote:
> For your reference to "transition state", there isn't this same issue on a 
> PITR because it receives and forwards packets from non-LISP sites, where 
> there is one IP header in the packet, and the source address is subject to 
> uRPF and forwarding rules as it is today.

The reason I mention "transition state" is you seem to be gravitating
towards ideas that require new inspection capabilities at
substantially all "legacy Internet" access providers in order to
protect the new LISP infrastructure.  If I can use any source IP
address I want when sending crafted packets, including crafted LISP
outer-header, to your LISP site, then the chances are good that I can
disable your site as long as I can generate enough PPS and there are
enough mappings in the system to produce cache churn in your xTR.

So relying on ITRs to prevent "bad traffic" from ever entering the
system will not work because there will be a large, legacy Internet
with no ability to prevent that traffic from reaching your site.

> Right, so you have some hard decisions to make. The ETR can do lookup in its 
> cache to figure out if the (source-RLOC, source-EID) is in its cache and if 
> not, drop the packet, then do a lookup so subsequent packets can have the 
> cache populated so the check can pass.

Except the ETR is bounded by the same cache scaling limits as an ITR
subject to a reflection attack, meaning its cache can churn, and
substantially all traffic needing to be decapsulated by that ETR would
be dropped.

> I call this the "needle in the haystack" problem. And we have had to deal 
> with this with hardware packet punting for a number of decades.

Even if you imagine that the xTR control-plane is not a bottleneck,
presuming that the data-plane can generate MS queries directly and can
update its FIB at an unlimited rate, the result of having a limited
FIB size plus an attack designed to take advantage of that means the
MS infrastructure will be required to have very low latency and very
high throughput to keep up with an xTR experiencing high PPS and low
cache hit rate because of churn.  This essentially would mean that the
MS infrastructure is directly involved in a substantial fraction of
packet forwarding decisions on that xTR.

--
Jeff S Wheeler <[email protected]>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts
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