Is AS information useful for security?
Justin M. Streiner
streiner at cluebyfour.org
Thu Dec 15 14:44:39 UTC 2011
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011, Joe Loiacono wrote:
> Is a good knowledge of either origin-AS, or next-AS with respect to flows
> valuable in establishing, monitoring, or re-enforcing a security posture?
> In what ways?
If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think it can be helpful,
to a degree. It's always good to 'know your neighbors', but for the most
part I don't think an organization's security posture would change very
much, based strictly on next-AS. In the case of next-AS, you already
know your neighbors somewhat, because you have some sort of a business
relationship with them (your transit providers, peers, downstream
BGP-speaking customers, etc).
origin-AS could be another story. If you know of an AS that is being used
by the bad guys for bad purposes, you can write a routing policy to dump
all traffic to/from that AS into the bit bucket or take some other action
that could be dictated by your security policy. In that case, a routing
policy could be considered an extension of a security policy.
jms
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