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Date:      Sun, 14 Jul 2002 21:55:42 -0700
From:      Joe Touch <touch@ISI.EDU>
To:        Lars Eggert <larse@ISI.EDU>
Cc:        net@freebsd.org, Yu-Shun Wang <yushunwa@ISI.EDU>
Subject:   Re: Denial-of-service through ARP snooping
Message-ID:  <3D3255CE.6000707@isi.edu>
References:  <3D3305D1.5050103@isi.edu>

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PS - this is more than a DOS attack. It's also a misconfiguration DOS 
attack. Users who type the wrong address in will cause this. I.e., even 
on a friendly LAN, a single accident can pull the net down.

Joe

Lars Eggert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> we've just stumbled over an interesting denial-of-service case at IETF. 
> I was playing with a custom startup script to auto-configure local 
> interfaces, part of which sent out an ARP request "borrowing" the IP 
> address of the gateway as source address (e.g. "who-has X tell X").
> 
> It seems that most/all BSDs do ARP snooping, and will happily add the 
> apparent "new" MAC address of the gateway to their ARP table, possibly 
> flushing the existing one of the default gateway. This of course causes 
> everybody's packets to fall on the floor until the fake ARP entry times 
> out. (RFC826 seems to imply that snooping is allowed, the "packet 
> reception" section doesn't seem to limit *how* packets are received.)
> 
> Maybe ARP entries should only be updated when replies are received in 
> response to locally originated requests? Initial latency might be a bit 
> higher, since the ARP table won't be pre-loaded, but it will add some 
> protection against this particular DOS attack.
> 
> Lars



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