4 ms·

> We found amplifiers that, once triggered by a single packet sequence from the attacker, will send an endless stream of packets to the victim. In our testing,

by shakna 5y ago

> We found amplifiers that, once triggered by a single packet sequence from the attacker, will send an endless stream of packets to the victim. In our testing, some of these packet streams lasted for days, often at the full bandwidth the amplifier’s link could supply. That would certainly make you feel like you were a victim under direct attack. And getting state actors on-board to fix this seems like it is never going to happen.

jessaustin 5y ago
Most states aren't monoliths. When the right lizard can't watch his Netflix when he wants, the shitboxes will be fixed.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Sadly the cheap solution is to exempt the Lizard from the shitbox. One of the things MPs asked for in the UK when it passed metadata retention laws was an exemption... for MPs. They were told it was impossible, although not with much detail. In reality it is impossible because (although it's often framed as a law about retaining specific metadata about specific individuals) the reality is the only order signed says retain Everything about Everybody, much simpler but just a little harder to sell as proportional to the supposed threat.
  - toast0 5y ago
    If the shitbox is sending garbage packets at line rate, it doesn't really matter if it's sending to you or someone else, now links in those directions are at least a lot more congested and that's likely to impact everyone else's experience. From past experience with endpoints that got into 'infinite' packet states, if you've got any monitoring at all, you notice when you're sending line rate garbage, even if you don't monitor packet sending directly, it'll spike your CPU and reduce your throughput/increase your latency for other tasks. That was, thankfully 1:1 packet generation, but sometimes got triggered by hosts (or middleboxes) with low latency and a 10G pipe; also thankfully it was a bug on our machines, so fixing it was not too bad (actually we had first seen the problem on localhost, when it showed up again on public interfaces, having seen it before made diagnosis pretty quick).

by shakna 5y ago

jessaustin 5y ago

Most states aren't monoliths. When the right lizard can't watch his Netflix when he wants, the shitboxes will be fixed.

tialaramex 5y ago
Sadly the cheap solution is to exempt the Lizard from the shitbox. One of the things MPs asked for in the UK when it passed metadata retention laws was an exemption... for MPs. They were told it was impossible, although not with much detail. In reality it is impossible because (although it's often framed as a law about retaining specific metadata about specific individuals) the reality is the only order signed says retain Everything about Everybody, much simpler but just a little harder to sell as proportional to the supposed threat.
- toast0 5y ago
  If the shitbox is sending garbage packets at line rate, it doesn't really matter if it's sending to you or someone else, now links in those directions are at least a lot more congested and that's likely to impact everyone else's experience. From past experience with endpoints that got into 'infinite' packet states, if you've got any monitoring at all, you notice when you're sending line rate garbage, even if you don't monitor packet sending directly, it'll spike your CPU and reduce your throughput/increase your latency for other tasks. That was, thankfully 1:1 packet generation, but sometimes got triggered by hosts (or middleboxes) with low latency and a 10G pipe; also thankfully it was a bug on our machines, so fixing it was not too bad (actually we had first seen the problem on localhost, when it showed up again on public interfaces, having seen it before made diagnosis pretty quick).