Subject: RE: [RPSEC] Draft Status....

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 10:42:35 -0700

Tony,

> Tony Tauber wrote:
> Limiting the length of all the attributes could help
> such a vulnerability, but the scaling for raw number of
> routes and balancing that with other demands in your
> embedded system seems sorta outside the scope of a
> protocol spec.

I do not think so. The lowest figure that I have for IPv6 multihoming is
one Billion routes (below is considered not enough to work on it).

As of today, nobody has the slightest clue about how BGP would behave
with a billion prefixes (if CPU/memory/bandwidth were not issues, that
is).

So, although I agree that between 100,000 routes and 200,000 routes (and
possibly up to a million) there is not much difference, when talking
about 1 billion routes there is one.

I am not saying that we will not see a routing protocol with a billion
routes, but the protocol I am working on has a completely different
mechanism of transmitting routes, and is a distributed system precisely
to avoid having a billion entries routing table.

How does this relate to rpsec:
In my protocol, I managed to keep the size of the routing table no more
than 64k routes. It is obvious that a router designed to handle 64k
routes will not handle a billion routes. Therefore, if some form of
attack manages to fill that router with a billion prefixes, it will
collapse.

So I'm not misunderstood: I'm not calling for rpsec to address this,
just trying to make the point that the raw number of routes does matter.

Michel.

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From: Russ White <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 13:52:07 -0400 (EDT)

Let's say this: I'm not quite certain where you come up with 1
billion (could you articulate it?), but I do agree that larger
numbers are in the coming in the future, and we have no idea how
the current routing protocols will react to them. The ipv6 folks
tell me that the routing table sizes should not change that
radically, because we will be summarizing in a radical way.

I always ponder that there are 4.2 billion addresses in a /32,
which is what I understand the registries are currently handing
out, and I'm hoping that summarization truly is radical.

:-)

Russ

> just trying to make the point that the raw number of routes does matter.

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