Subject: [NSIS] Security Threats for NSIS : Denial of Service Attacks

From: Tschofenig Hannes <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:45:18 +0200

hi all, 

a question regarding dos attacks: 

> 4.8 Denial of Service Attacks 
>     
>    - Path Finding 
>     
>    This threat scenario includes potential DoS attacks that exist when 
>    the reservation setup is split into two phases, i.e., path and 
>    reservation (as used, for example, in receiver-based reservation 
>    setup). In this case, assuming that the node transmitting the path 
>    message is not charged for the path message itself, it may be able 
>    to generate a large number of reservation requests (possibly in a 

> Is this really specifically about reservation requests? It sounds
> generically like a threat caused by any message which can be sent
> without direct cost. (In particular, referring to reservation 
> requests rather than messsages in general makes it sound like 
> this is a threat to the resource pool, whereas I think it is a
> threat to the control plane.)

i should change the description from 

"
   - Path Finding 
    
   This threat scenario includes potential DoS attacks that exist when 
   the reservation setup is split into two phases, i.e., path and 
   reservation (as used, for example, in receiver-based reservation 
   setup). In this case, assuming that the node transmitting the path 
   message is not charged for the path message itself, it may be able 
   to generate a large number of reservation requests (possibly in a 
   distributed fashion). Charging is activated only after successful 
   verification of the reservation request. The reservations are, 
   however, never intended to be successful for various reasons: the 
   destination node cannot be reached; it is not responding; or it 
   simply rejects the reservation. An adversary can succeed because 
   state has already been allocated along the path for various 
   processing tasks including path pinning.  
" 

to 

"
Some signaling protocols establish state (e.g., routing state) and perform
some actions (e.g., querying resources) at a number of nodes (NSIS
forwarders) without requiring authorization (or even proper authentication)
based on a single message (e.g., PATH message in RSVP). 

An adversary can utilize this fact to transmit a large number of signaling
messages to allocate state at nodes along the path and to cause resource
consumption. 

An NSIS responder might not be able to determine the NSIS initiator and
might even tend to respond to such a signaling message with a corresponding
reservation message. 
"

is this text more useful? 

ciao
hannes

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