On Jan 23, 2014, at 7:46 AM, Demian Rosenkranz <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm thinking about another potential DoS attack. An entity which owns a CA 
> certificate has the possibility to generate a huge hierarchy of further CA 
> certificates without any limitation (as far as I know).
> 
> In contrast to the generation of a huge amount of ROAs, this attack isn't 
> limited regarding the number of objects/certificates.
> 
> I.e. a compromised/bad entity owns a /16 prefix and generates 10000 CA 
> certificates and hand down this prefix until the lowest CA certificate and 
> generates 2^8 ROAs, a relying party software would be forced to check this 
> hierarchy 2^8 times.
> Of course, this is kind of a blunt attack but without making any provisions, 
> this "local cache flooding" could lead to a disturbance of all (worst case) 
> local caches for a certain time. Some smaller RP could be slower in remedying 
> this.
> 
> Are there any restriction to this attack I've missed? Any feedback is very 
> welcome!

We certainly see this scale of prefix registration within the IRR dataset.  
(Folks registering each variant of the entire covering prefix of a /16 for 
example).

I imagine the same would be done with the same rationale by someone well 
intentioned.

- Jared
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