DDoS attacks, Internet, new Internet and POTS...

I was just thinking about many initiatives (e.g. GENI) to design Internet from scratch! It certainly requires us to break out from the current way of thinking, that's with us for about 40 years now, and to find and propose something new. The good example of this break through was the Internet itself, i.e. the concept of packet switched network. As a side note, Van Jacobson has an idea of how this new might look like and I recommend the reader to find his lecture he held in Google on Google Videos.

While thinking about what is this "new" thing, I took as an example DDoS attacks. There are no DDoS attacks in POTS and they are a big problem for the Internet. So, how this new mechanism should work in order to prevent DDoS attacks. The key point of DDoS attack (or more generally, DoS attack) is that there are finite resources that are consumed by attacker and thus, regular users can not access those resources, they are denied service.

And, while I was thinking about it, I actually realised that there is DDoS attack possibility in the POTS as there are also finite resources. Ok, ok, I know, I managed to reinvent the wheel, but hey, I'm happy with it. :) So, if possible, why there are no DoS attacks in telephony? The key point is that end devices in POTS are dumb and thus, not remotely controllable. If they were remotely controllable, then the attacker would be able to gain access to them and to use huge number of those devices to mount an attack on selected victim. Maybe this attack would be even more effective than the one on the Internet since resources taken by end devices are not shared even though the end devices don't use them.

It turns out that DDoS attack is actually a consequence of giving more power to the user via the more capable end devices. Furthermore, because those end devices are complex systems it's inevitable that there would be many ways of breaking in and controlling them.

Of course, someone might argue that the problem is in ease with which IP packets can be spoofed. But, this is actually easily solvable, at least in theory, if each ISP would control it's access network for spoofed addresses. The more serious problem is actually DoS attack made by legitimate IP packets. It is traceable if coming from a single source, or small number of sources, but the real problem is a network of compromized hosts (botnets). There is no defence from those networks as they look as legitimate users.

So, because we are limited with real world and we'll always have only finite resources on our disposal it turns out that the only way of getting rid of DDoS is to restrict end devices, which by itself is impossible. Now, this is thinking within current framework. But, what if we can made finite resource apparently infinite, or somehow restrict end devices.... This is something for further thinking...