Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Alert (TA14-017A) - UDP based Amplification Attacks

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Alert (TA14-017A) - UDP based Amplification Attacks


This is something I would like to keep track, so posting it here. Very useful and scary that how easily it can happen.

Alert (TA14-017A)

Following diagram shows how UDP based Amplification Attacks are carried out. Very simple, a 4MB ADSL connection can amplify upto 400MB traffiic easily. Take note of the Bandwidth amplification factor table below.


Systems Affected

Certain UDP protocols have been identified as potential attack vectors:
  • DNS
  • NTP
  • SNMPv2
  • NetBIOS
  • SSDP
  • CharGEN
  • QOTD
  • BitTorrent
  • Kad
  • Quake Network Protocol
  • Steam Protocol

Overview

A Distributed Reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS) attack is an emerging form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that relies on the use of publicly accessible UDP servers, as well as bandwidth amplification factors, to overwhelm a victim system with UDP traffic.

Description

UDP, by design, is a connection-less protocol that does not validate source IP addresses.  Unless the application-layer protocol uses countermeasures such as session initiation, it is very easy to forge the IP packet datagram to include an arbitrary source IP address [7].  When many UDP packets have their source IP address forged to a single address, the server responds to that victim, creating a reflected Denial of Service (DoS) Attack.
Recently, certain UDP protocols have been found to have particular responses to certain commands that are much larger than the initial request.  Where before, attackers were limited linearly by the number of packets directly sent to the target to conduct a DoS attack, now a single packet can generate tens or hundreds of times the bandwidth in its response.  This is called an amplification attack, and when combined with a reflective DoS attack on a large scale it makes it relatively easy to conduct DDoS attacks.
To measure the potential effect of an amplification attack, we use a metric called the bandwidth amplification factor (BAF).  BAF can be calculated as the number of UDP payload bytes that an amplifier sends to answer a request, compared to the number of UDP payload bytes of the request.
The list of known protocols, and their associated bandwidth amplification factors, is listed below.  US-CERT would like to offer thanks to Christian Rossow for providing this information to us.

Read the rest of it here: Alert (TA14-017A) - UDP based Amplification Attacks

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