Comment by gnfargbl
7 hours ago
The recent Azure DDoS used 500k botnet IPs. These will have been widely distributed across subnets and countries, so your blocking approach would not have been an effective mitigation.
Identifying and dynamically blocking the 500k offending IPs would certainly be possible technically -- 500k /32s is not a hard filtering problem -- but I seriously question the operational ability of internet providers to perform such granular blocking in real-time against dynamic targets.
I also have concerns that automated blocking protocols would be widely abused by bad actors who are able to engineer their way into the network at a carrier level (i.e. certain governments).
> 500k /32s is not a hard filtering problem
Is this really true? What device in the network are you loading that filter into? Is it even capable of handling the packet throughput of that many clients while also handling such a large block list?
But this is not one subnet. It is a large number of IPs distributed across a bunch of providers, and handled possibly by dozens if not hundreds of routers along the way. Each of these routers won't have trouble blocking a dozen or two IPs that would be currently involved in a DDoS attack.
But this would require a service like DNSBL / RBL which email providers use. Mutually trusting big players would exchange lists of IPs currently involved in DDoS attacks, and block them way downstream in their networks, a few hops from the originating machines. They could even notify the affected customers.
But this would require a lot of work to build, and a serious amount of care to operate correctly and efficiently. ISPs don't seem to have a monetary incentive to do that.
It also completely overlooks the fact that some of the traffic has spoofed source IP addresses and a bad actor could use automated black holing to knock a legitimate site offline.
> a bad actor could use automated black holing to knock a legitimate site offline.
No, in my concept the host can only manage the traffic targeted at it and not at other hosts.
That already exists… that's part of cloudflare and other vendors mitigation strategy. There’s absolutely no chance ISPs are going to extend that functionality to random individuals on the internet.