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Re: national security

2003-12-08 10:17:26

On 8 Dec 2003, at 10:14, Dean Anderson wrote:

Also, anycasting doesn't work for TCP.

Would you care to elaborate on "doesn't work"?

I agree. It is easy to create a blackhole, or even a DDOS on an anycast address. It is much harder to DDOS 600 IP addresses spread through some
200 countries.

It's arguably easier for a distributed attack to cause degrade the availability of a service bound to a unicast-reachable address than an anycast-reachable address. The former will tend to collect traffic along a progressively narrow funnel until congestion occurs; with an anycast target the pain is distributed over a set of funnels, and in general not all will experience the same degree (or any) pain, depending on the distribution and behaviour of the attacking nodes.

In a non-distributed attack anycast victims fare subtantially better (since non-select anycast targets are unaffected, and only suffer topological fallout from the node sinking the attack traffic).


Joe