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Why Is DDoS Hard to Solve?

Why Is DDoS Hard to Solve?. A simple form of attack Designed to prey on the Internet’s strengths Easy availability of attack machines Attack can look like normal traffic Lack of Internet enforcement tools Hard to get cooperation from others Effective solutions hard to deploy.

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Why Is DDoS Hard to Solve?

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  1. Why Is DDoS Hard to Solve? • A simple form of attack • Designed to prey on the Internet’s strengths • Easy availability of attack machines • Attack can look like normal traffic • Lack of Internet enforcement tools • Hard to get cooperation from others • Effective solutions hard to deploy

  2. 1. Simplicity Of Attack • Basically, just send someone a lot of traffic • More complicated versions can add refinements, but that’s the crux of it • No need to find new vulnerabilities • No need to worry about timing, tracing, etc. • Toolkits are readily available to allow the novice to perform DDoS • Even distributed parts are very simple

  3. 2. Preys On Internet’s Strengths • The Internet was designed to deliver lots of traffic • From lots of places, to lots of places • DDoS attackers want to deliver lots of traffic from lots of places to one place • Any individual packet can look proper to the Internet • Without sophisticated analysis, even the entire flow can appear proper

  4. Internet Resource Utilization • Internet was not designed to monitor resource utilization • Most of it follows first come, first served model • Many network services work the same way • And many key underlying mechanisms do, too • Thus, if a villain can get to the important resources first, he can often deny them to good users

  5. 3. Availability Of Attack Machines • DDoS is feasible because attackers can enlist many machines • Attackers can enlist many machines because many machines are readily vulnerable • Not hard to find 1,000 crackable machines on the Internet • Particularly if you don’t care which 1,000 • Botnets numbering hundreds of thousands of hosts have been discovered

  6. Can’t We Fix These Vulnerabilities? • DDoS attacks don’t really harm the attacking machines • Many people don’t protect their machines even when the attacks can harm them • Why will they start protecting their machines just to help others? • Altruism has not yet proven to be a compelling argument for for network security

  7. 4. Attacks Resemble Normal Traffic • A DDoS attack can consist of vast number of requests for a web server’s home page • No need for attacker to use particular packets or packet contents • So neat filtering/signature tools may not help • Attacker can be arbitrarily sophisticated at mirroring legitimate traffic • In principle • Not often done because dumb attacks work so well

  8. 5. Lack Of Enforcement Tools • DDoS attackers have never been caught by tracing or observing attack • Only by old-fashioned detective work • Really, only when they’re dumb enough to boast about their success • The Internet offers no help in tracing a single attack stream, much less multiple ones • Even if you trace them, a clever attacker leaves no clues of his identity on those machines

  9. What Is the Internet Lacking? • No validation of IP source address • No enforcement of amount of resources used • No method of tracking attack flows • Or those controlling attack flows • No method of assigning responsibility for bad packets or packet streams • No mechanism or tools for determining who corrupted a machine

  10. 6. Poor Cooperation In the Internet • It’s hard to get anyone to help you stop or trace or prevent an attack • Even your ISP might not be too cooperative • Anyone upstream of your ISP is less likely to be cooperative • ISPs more likely to cooperate with each other, though • Even if cooperation occurs, it occurs at human timescales • The attack might be over by the time you figure out who to call

  11. 7. Effective Solutions Hard To Deploy • The easiest place to deploy defensive systems is near your own machine • Defenses there might not work well (firewall example) • There are effective solutions under research • But they require deployment near attackers or in the Internet core • Or, worse, in many places • A working solution is useless without deployment • Hard to get anything deployed if deploying site gets no direct advantage

  12. Resource Limitations • Don’t allow an individual attack machine to use many of a target’s resources • Requires: • Authentication, or • Making the sender do special work (puzzles) • Authentication schemes are often expensive for the receiver • Existing legitimate senders largely not set up to handle doing special work • Can still be overcome with a large enough army of zombies

  13. Hiding From the Attacker • Make it hard for anyone but legitimate clients to deliver messages at all • E.g., keep your machine’s identity obscure • A possible solution for some potential targets • But not for others, like public web servers • To the extent that approach relies on secrecy, it’s fragile • Some such approaches don’t require secrecy

  14. Resource Multiplication • As attacker demands more resources, supply them • Essentially, never allow resources to be depleted • Not always possible, usually expensive • Not clear that defender can keep ahead of the attacker • But still a good step against limited attacks • More advanced versions might use Akamai-like techniques

  15. Trace and Stop Attacks • Figure out which machines attacks come from • Go to those machines (or near them) and stop the attacks • Tracing is trivial if IP source addresses aren’t spoofed • Tracing may be possible even if they are spoofed • May not have ability/authority to do anything once you’ve found the attack machines • Not too helpful if attacker has a vast supply of machines

  16. Filtering Attack Streams • The basis for most defensive approaches • Addresses the core of the problem by limiting the amount of work presented to target • Key question is: • What do you drop? • Good solutions drop all (and only) attack traffic • Less good solutions drop some (or all) of everything

  17. Filtering Vs. Rate Limiting • Filtering drops packets with particular characteristics • If you get the characteristics right, you do little collateral damage • At odds with the desire to drop all attack traffic • Rate limiting drops packets on basis of amount of traffic • Can thus assure target is not overwhelmed • But may drop some good traffic • You can combine them (drop traffic for which you are sure is suspicious, rate-limit the rest) but you gain a little

  18. Where Do You Filter? In multiple places? In the network core? Near the source? Near the target?

  19. Filtering Location Choices • Near target • Near source • In core

  20. Filtering Location Choices • Near target • Easier to detect attack • Sees everything • May be hard to prevent collateral damage • May be hard to handle attack volume • Near source • In core

  21. Filtering Location Choices • Near target • Near source • May be hard to detect attack • Doesn’t see everything • Easier to prevent collateral damage • Easier to handle attack volume • In core

  22. Filtering Location Choices • Near target • Near source • In core • Easier to handle attack volume • Sees everything (with sufficient deployment) • May be hard to prevent collateral damage • May be hard to detect attack

  23. How Do You Detect Attacks? • Have database of attack signatures • Detect anomalous behavior • By measuring some parameters for a long time and setting a baseline • Detecting when their values are abnormally high • By defining which behavior must be obeyed starting from some protocol specification

  24. How Do You Filter? • Devise filters that encompass most of anomalous traffic • Drop everything but give priority to legitimate-looking traffic • It has some parameter values • It has certain behavior

  25. DDoS Defense Challenges • Need for a distributed response • Economic and social factors • Lack of detailed attack information • Lack of defense system benchmarks • Difficulty of large-scale testing • Moving target

  26. TCP SYN Flood • Attacker sends lots of TCP SYN packets • Victim sends an ack, allocates space in memory • Attacker never replies • Goal is to fill up memory before entries time out and get deleted • Usually spoofed traffic • Otherwise patterns may be used for filtering • OS at the attacker or spoofed address may send RST and free up memory

  27. TCP SYN Cookies • Effective defense against TCP SYN flood • Victim encodes connection information and time in ACK number • Must be hard to craft values that get encoded into the same ACK number – use crypto for encoding • Memory is only reserved when final ACK comes • Only the server must change • But TCP options are not supported • And lost SYN ACKs are not repeated

  28. Small-Packet Floods • Overwhelm routers • Create a lot of pps • Exhaust CPU • Most routers can’t handle full bandwidth’s load of small packets • No real solution, must filter packets somehow to reduce router load

  29. Shrew Attack • Periodically slam the victim with short, high-volume pulses • Lead to congestion drops on client’s TCP traffic • TCP backs off • If loss is large back off to 1 MSS per RTT • Attacker slams again after a few RTTs • Solution requires TCP protocol changes • Tough to implement since clients must be changed

  30. Flash-Crowd Attack • Generate legitimate application traffic to the victim • E.g., DNS requests, Web requests • Usually not spoofed • If enough bots are used no client appears too aggressive • Really hard to filter since both traffic and client behavior seem identical between attackers and legitimate users

  31. Reflector Attack • Generate service requests to public servers spoofing the victim’s IP • Servers reply back to the victim overwhelming it • Usually done for UDP and ICMP traffic (TCP SYN flood would only overwhelm CPU if huge number of packets is generated) • Often takes advantage of amplification effect – some service requests lead to huge replies; this lets attacker amplify his attack

  32. Sample Research Defenses • Pushback • Traceback • SOS • Proof-of-work systems • Human behavior modeling

  33. Pushback1 1”Controlling high bandwidth aggregates in the network,” Mahajan, Bellovin, Floyd, Paxson, Shenker, ACM CCR, July 2002 • Goal: Preferentially drop attack traffic to relieve congestion • Local ACC: Enable core routers to respond to congestion locally by: • Profiling traffic dropped by RED • Identifying high-bandwidth aggregates • Preferentially dropping aggregate traffic to enforce desired bandwidth limit • Pushback: A router identifies the upstream neighbors that forward the aggregate traffic to it, requests that they deploy rate-limit

  34. Can it Work? • Even a few core routers are able to control high-volume attacks • Separation of traffic aggregates improves current situation • Only traffic for the victim is dropped • Drops affect a portion containing the attack traffic • Likely to successfully control the attack, relieving congestion in the Internet • Will inflict collateral damage on legitimate traffic

  35. Advantages and Limitations • Routers can handle high traffic volumes • Deployment at a few core routers can affectmany traffic flows, due to core topology • Simple operation, no overhead for routers • Pushback minimizes collateral damage by placing response close to the sources • Pushback only works in contiguous deployment • Collateral damage is inflicted by response, whenever attack is not clearly separable • Requires modification of existing core routers

  36. Traceback1 1“Practical network support for IP Traceback,” Savage, Wetherall, Karlin, Anderson, ACM SIGCOMM 2000 • Goal: locate the agent machines • Each packet header may carry a mark, containing: • EdgeID(IP addresses of the routers) specifying an edge it has traversed • The distance from the edge • Routers mark packets probabilistically • If a router detects half-marked packet (containing only one IP address) it will complete the mark • Victim under attack reconstructs the path from the marked packets

  37. Traceback and IP Spoofing • Tracebackdoes nothing to stop DDoS attacks • It only identifies attackers’ true locations • Comes to a vicinity of attacker • If IP spoofing were not possible in the Internet, traceback would not be necessary • There areother approaches to filter out spoofed traffic

  38. Can it Work? • Incrementally deployable, a few disjoint routers can provide beneficial information • Moderate router overhead (packet modification) • A few thousand packets are needed even for long path reconstruction • Does not work well for highly distributed attacks • Path reassembly is computationally demanding, and is not 100% accurate: • Path information cannot be used for legal purposes • Routers close to the sources can efficiently block attack traffic, minimizing collateral damage

  39. Advantages and Limitations • Incrementally deployable • Effective for non-distributed attacks and for highly overlapping attack paths • Facilitates locating routers close to the sources • Packet marking incurs overhead at routers, must be performed at slow path • Path reassembly is complex and prone to errors • Reassembly of distributed attack paths is prohibitively expensive

  40. SOS1 1“ SOS: Secure Overlay Services,” Keromytis, Misra, Rubensteain, ACM SIGCOMM 2002 • Goal: route only “verified user” traffic to the server, drop everything else • Clients use overlay network to reach the server • Clients are authenticated at the overlay entrance, their packets are routed to proxies • Small set of proxies are “approved” to reach the server, all other traffic is heavily filtered out

  41. SOS • User first contacts nodes that can check its legitimacy and let him access the overlay – access points • An overlay node uses Chord overlay routing protocol to send user’s packets to a beacon • Beacon sends packets to a secret servlet • Secret servlets tunnel packets to the firewall • Firewall only lets through packets with an IP of a secret servlet • Secret servlet’s identity has to be hidden, because their source address is a passport for the realm beyond the firewall • Beacons are nodes that know the identity of secret servlets • If a node fails, other nodes can take its role

  42. Can It Work? • SOS successfully protects communication with a private server: • Access points can distinguish legitimate from attack communications • Overlay protects traffic flow • Firewall drops attack packets • Redundancy in the overlay and secrecy of the path to the target provide security against DoS attacks on SOS

  43. Advantages And Limitations • Ensures communication of “verified user” with the victim • Resilient to overlay node failure • Resilient to DoS on the defense system • Does not work for public service • Traffic routed through the overlay travels on suboptimal path • Brute force attack on links leading to the firewall still possible

  44. Client Puzzles1 1“Client puzzles: A cryptographic countermeasure against connection depletion attacks,” Juels, Brainard, NDSS 1999 • Goal: defend against connection depletion attacks • When under attack: • Server distributes small cryptographic puzzles to clients requesting service • Clients spend resources to solve the puzzles • Correct solution, submitted on time, leads to state allocation and connection establishment • Non-validated connection packets are dropped • Puzzle generation is stateless • Client cannot reuse puzzle solutions • Attacker cannot make use of intercepted packets

  45. Can It Work? • Client puzzles guarantee that each client has spent a certain amount of resources • Server determines the difficulty of the puzzle according to its resource consumption • Effectively server controls its resource consumption • Protocol is safe against replay or interception attacks • Other flooding attacks will still work

  46. Advantages And Limitations • Forces the attacker to spend resources, protects server resources from depletion • Attacker can only generate a certain number of successful connections from one agent machine • Low overhead on server • Requires client modification • Will not work against highly distributed attacks • Will not work against bandwidth consumption attacks (Defense By Offense paper changes this)

  47. Human Behavior Modeling1 1“Modeling Human Behavior for Defense Against Flash Crowd Attacks”, Oikonomou, Mirkovic 2009. • Goal: defend against flash-crowd attacks on Web servers • Model human behavior along three dimensions • Dynamics of interaction with server (trained) • Detect aggressive clients as attackers • Semantics of interaction with server (trained) • Detect clients that browse unpopular content or use unpopular paths as attackers • Processing of visual and textual cues • Detect clients that click on invisible or uninteresting links as attackers

  48. Can It Work? • Attackers can bypass detection if they • Act non-aggressively • Use each bot for just a few requests, then replace it • But this forces attacker to use many bots • Tens to hundreds of thousands • Beyond reach of most attackers • Other flooding attacks will still work

  49. Advantages And Limitations • Transparent to users • Low false positives and false negatives • Requires server modification • Server must store data about each client • Will not work against other flooding attacks • May not protect services where humans do not generate traffic, e.g., DNS

  50. Worms

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