Subject: Re: [rrg] [ot] wikileak, cyber-war,...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 04:28:01 EST

In einer eMail vom 31.12.2010 21:58:55 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt  
[email-masked]:

On  2010-12-28, $witch wrote:

>> Wouldn't it be reasonable to develop  CASCADE TREE routing as to screw 
>> DoS and DDoS attacks  [......]?
>
> maybe am a little bit off-topic but : why RRG need  to take position 
> against [D]DoS ?

My plea for better routing is long-term (approx. 8 years). Coming up with  
CASCADE TREE (now, again) is triggered by the actuality (wikileak)  Don't  
just think of malicious games where viruses attack some website. There may be 
 situations, e.g. conjured up by frigthening news, where alerted people 
send in  requests by the millions. On 9/27/2010 I referred to stuxnet pointing 
out how  TARA could serve as a hot standby archtecture (the costs wrt memory 
and CPU time  consumption is neglectible). Altogether: It is a plea for 
more  intelligent networking layer based on additional/better algorithms  than 
plain Dijkstra or even dumb DV.

It  might be that flow and/or congestion control isn't now a routing 
problem,  but everybody knows it's a core part of Internet architecture, 
and that  (D)DoS is predicated upon circumventing it. So, it is a very 
real problem.  If it can't be solved in some other way -- the ongoing 
backwards  congestion signaling and pricing work springs to mind, and 
even that  impacts IP level functionality as it stands -- then it isn't 
readily out  of the question that the RRG would have to be involved at 
some  point.

That's not on the formal agenda, though, so for now this sort of  
discussion does remain off-topic. (Personally I try to use the [ot]  
marker for this stuff, to enable automatic filtering,  btw.)
There are 2 ways of proceeding: 
1) Now let's just be focused on the scalability issue; when done, look at  
the next issue,...
or 2) Go for an architecture, which eliminates the scalabilits issue and  
which, concurrently, provides the basis for better routing.

> maybe DDoSes are the only weapons in the hand of  freedom, why do you 
> like to downgrade them?

Here we're talking  about not only e2e communication, but e2e, collective 
incentivization.  I.e. something that is very much more political, 
incendiary and  complicated than even state mandated policy routing. The 
stuff the Big  Boys and Three Letter Agencies are keenly interested in. 
Would IETF/IRTF  even *want* to go there?
My email was indeed triggered by a series of articles requesting a German  
defense center against internet
misbehavior (spionage, DDoSA).

Then if we leave out the politics and stick to the  technical detail, 
it's true that the only real disincentive that works  from end to end is 
(D)DoS. If we grant that such incentivization should be  possible, that 
is a technical problem because DoS is a highly wasteful and  disruptive 
means of communicating such information, with lots of  collateral damage.

As such the proper way to address this would be to  a) make DoS 
impossible or uneconomic at the architecture level, and then  to b) 
design a low-overhead, e2e, secure, Internet Punishment Protocol to  make 
this kind of feedback more explicit, scalable and  manageable.

It's just that... At least for me something like IPP is  stuff I'd expect 
to find in an April's Fool RFC. Not in any serious  one.

DDoS resistant routing though sounds interesting. The HIP  folks have 
been thinking about that sort of thing from the start,  obviously. I 
wonder if some of their ideas, e.g. in the four-way handshake  with 
expensive challenges, could be leveraged within the  core-edge-separation 
work? I mean, without too much centralized  computational burden; perhaps 
only in connection with mobility, where the  end networks are many and 
lean? There and then I'd like to hear more about  "cascade tree routing", 
and judging by the name, also about how it might  potentially connect 
with MPLS and Nimrod.
You may conceive Cascade Tree Routing as a cascade tree of tunnels - of  
whichever nature (incl. LSP,..)

--  
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - [email-masked],  http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0  E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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Heiner