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Date:      Wed, 19 Sep 2001 14:01:22 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Rob Simmons <rsimmons@wlcg.com>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        <security@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Defense against "Code Rainbow"
Message-ID:  <20010919135456.M62587-100000@mail.wlcg.com>
In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20010919112438.0598b8b0@localhost>

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This poses the same problem as allowing snort, or snort-like NIDS systems
access to your firewall rules.  It opens a new window for DOS attacks.
If some nefarious person figured out that you are doing such a thing, they
could spoof attacks from many addresses and cripple the server.

A much better approach is something like hogwash, which will only block
the attack itself, allowing all normal traffic to pass.

http://hogwash.sourceforge.net/

There was traffic on this list about making a freebsd port of the
software, but that is not needed, just grab the source and compile :)

Robert Simmons
Systems Administrator
http://www.wlcg.com/

On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Brett Glass wrote:

> I'm working on an automatic defense against "Code Rainbow" and would
> appreciate suggestions about how to refine it so that others can use it.
>
> My first quick-and-dirty attempt was to create an ErrorDocument for
> Apache that was not actually a document but rather a CGI script. If the
> script saw that the error was not "Code Rainbow," it sent back a standard
> error code. But if it recognized a "Code Rainbow" attack, it blackholed
> the attacker's IP address (available to CGI programs via the REMOTE_ADDR
> environment variable) via the system routing table and dropped the
> connection... cold. Bingo -- the attacking machine was locked out. (To
> give the CGI script the ability to change the routing table safely, I had
> to create a setuid program that could be invoked only by the CGI script
> and could do nothing but add a blackhole route.)
>
> Unfortunately, there was a serious problem with this approach. The BSD
> TCP/IP stack apparently does not expect its routing table to be very big,
> and so scans it linearly. This means that, as the list of blackhole
> routes grew, we started to see serious problems with network performance.
> I tried creating ipfw rules instead, but discovered that ipfw scans
> linearly too. What does ipf use? pf? Any ideas for speedups or security
> enhancements?
>
> --Brett Glass
>
>
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message
>
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