1. Introduction

A resurgence of Denial of Service Attacks [1] aimed at various targets in the Internet have produced new challenges within the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and network security communities to find new and innovative methods to mitigate these types of attacks. The difficulties in reaching this goal are numerous; some simple tools already exist to limit the effectiveness and scope of these attacks, but they have not been widely implemented.

This method of attack has been known for some time. Defending against it, however, has been an ongoing concern. Bill Cheswick is quoted in [2] as saying that he pulled a chapter from his book, "Firewalls and Internet Security" [3], at the last minute because there was no way for an administrator of the system under attack to effectively defend the system. By mentioning the method, he was concerned about encouraging it's use.

While the filtering method discussed in this document does absolutely nothing to protect against flooding attacks which originate from valid prefixes (IP addresses), it will prohibit an attacker within the originating network from launching an attack of this nature using forged source addresses that do not conform to ingress filtering rules. All providers of Internet connectivity are urged to implement filtering described in this document to prohibit attackers from using forged source addresses which do not reside within a range of legitimately advertised prefixes. In other words, if an ISP is aggregating routing announcements for multiple downstream networks, strict traffic filtering should be used to prohibit traffic which claims to have originated from outside of these aggregated announcements.

An additional benefit of implementing this type of filtering is that it enables the originator to be easily traced to it's true source, since the attacker would have to use a valid, and legitimately reachable, source address.