The Crossfire Attack MIN SUK KANG, SOO BUM LEE, VIRGIL D. GLIGOR ECE DEPARTMENT AND CYLAB CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 2

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 3

INTRODUCTION – Old DDoS  Typical attack:  floods server with HTTP, UDP, SYN, ICMP…… packets  Persistence:  Maximum: 2.5 days  Average: 1.5days  Adversary’s Challenge:  DDoS Attacks are either Persistent or Scalable to N Servers  N traffic to 1 server => high-intensity traffic triggers network detection  Detection not triggered => low-intensity traffic is insufficient for N srevers 4

INTRODUCTION – Crossfire Attack  Link flooding by botnets cannot be easily countered  Spoofed IP addresses.  Can flood links without using unwanted traffic.  Launch an attack with low-intensity traffic flows that cross a targeted link at roughly the same time and flood it. 5

 A link-flooding attack that degrades/cuts off network connections of scalable N-server area persistently.  Scalable N-Server areas  N = small(e.g., servers), medium(e.g., all servers in a US state), large(e.g., the West Coast of the US)  Persistent:  Attack traffic is indistinguishable from legitimate  Low-rate, changing sets of flows  Attack is “ moving target ” for same N-server area  Changing target links before triggering alarms INTRODUCTION – Crossfire Attack 6

INTRODUCTION – Definitions 7

 Attack flows => Indistinguishable from legitimate INTRODUCTION – 1 link crossfire 8

 Attack flows => Alarms not triggered INTRODUCTION – 1 link crossfire link-failure detection latency, Interior Gateway Protocol(IGP) routers (OSPF) Default waiting time: 40sec, Failure detection: 217 sec Exterior Gateway Protocol(EGP) routers(BGP) Default waiting time: 180sec, Failure detection : 1,076 sec 9

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 10

THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK 11

 Public servers :  To construct an attack topology centered at target area  Decoy servers:  To create attack flow THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK 12

ATTACK - Step 1 : Link Map Construction ( 72% ) (1) Traceroute ( B->S ) (2) Link-Persistence 13

ATTACK - Step 2 : Attack setup (1) Flow-Density Computation (2) Target-Link Selection DR: Degradation Ratio 14

ATTACK - Step 3 : Bot Coordination (1) Attack-Flow Assignment (2) Target-Link Flooding 15

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 16

ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST  Data-Plane-Only Attack : Indefinite Duration  Link failure detection  Traffic engineering  Proactive Attack Techniques : Rolling Attack  Maintaining the same target links  Changes bot and decoy servers  Maintaining the same target area  Changes target links 17

 Attack bots available from Pay-per Install (PPI) markets [2011] ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST In experiments : 49% in US or UK, 37% in Europe, 14% rest of the world 10 target links : can be as low as 107,200 bots. Cost approximately $9K 18

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 19

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS  Bots:  1,072 traceroute nodes 620 PlanetLab nodes, 452 LG(Looking Glass) servers 20

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS  Decoy servers:  552 institutions (i.e., universities and colleges ) on both the East Coast (10 states) and West Coast (7 states) of the US  2737 public web servers within Univ1 in Pennsylvania  7411 public web servers within Univ2 in Massachusetts 21

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS  Target Areas: 22

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS 23

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS  Link map  Run a traceroute six times to diagnose link persistence 24

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS 25

EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS  Average rate when flooding 10 Target Links against Pennsylvania 26

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS RELATED WORK CONCLUSION 27

The Coremelt Attack 28

“Spamhaus” Attack 29

RELATED WORK 30

Outline INTRODUCTION THE CROSSFIRE ATTACK ATTACK PERSISTENCE AND COST EXPERIMENT SETUP AND RESULTS CONCLUSION 31

CONCLUSION  Attack Characteristics  Undetectability at the Target Area.  Indistinguishability of Flows in Routers  Persistence  Flexibility  New DDoS Attack: The Crossfire Attack  Scalable & Persistent  Internet-scale experiment  Feasibility of the attack  High impact with low cost 32

Q&A 33