NAP/ISP Saturation WAS: Re: Exchanges that matter...

Tony Li tli at jnx.com
Sat Dec 21 03:23:56 UTC 1996


   > Indeed. For instance SYN-flood the BGP port.

	   Correct me if I'm wrong but to the best of my recollection, in
   order for a packet to be accepted on the BGP port, it must be originating
   from a configured BGP peer. Since the SYN flood method relies on the
   attack originating from an unreachable (yet routable) address, it would
   seem that this approach will fail. 

If you're out for a true DoS attack, it need not even be a SYN attack.
Simply flooding the BGP port would be quite enough to bring the system to
its knees.  Forge a known peer's source address, and even the CPU that it
burns testing for authentication and discarding packets would be enough to
be fatal.

The important point is that you can't distinguish the good from the bad
without a whole lot of work.

Tony









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