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RE: Heartbeats (was RE: keepalives)
> Ricky> * Unsecured heartbeats in the clear leave you open to DOS
> Ricky> attack as anybody can spoof you into thinking that your peer
> Ricky> is no-responsive.
>
> How can you do that? Clearly you can make a down peer appear up, but
> I don't see how you can make an up peer appear down by spoofing
> packets.
Didn't you know? You just spoof an anti-packet. When the packet and
anti-packet collide they annihalate each other. The resulting EMP takes down
your gateway, causing DoS.
Obviously we can't deal with the non-responsiveness issue. The only way to
spoof non-responsiveness is for the attacker to remove packets from the
wire, and if they can do that then they don't need any help effecting a DoS
attack.
Maybe Ricky was saying that if we were to tear down the channel if we
received a badly formatted packet from the peer then we would be vulnerable
to DoS. That's why any good heartbeat protocol has to ignore any packets
that could have been spoofed.
Andrew
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Truth without beauty is unbearable.
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