The Case for In-Network Replay Suppression

Abstract

We make a case for packet-replay suppression at the network layer, a concept that has been generally neglected. Our contribution is twofold. First, we demonstrate a new attack, the router-reflection attack, that can be launched using compromised routers. In this attack, a compromised router degrades the connectivity of a remote Internet region just by replaying packets. The attack is feasible even if all packets are attributed to their sources, i.e., source authentication is in place, and our evaluation shows that the threat is pervasive---candidate routers for compromise are in the order of hundreds or thousands. Second, we design an in-network mechanism for replay suppression. We start by showing that designing such a mechanism poses unsolved challenges and simple adaptations of end-to-end solutions are not sufficient. Then, we devise, analyze, and implement a highly efficient protocol that suppresses replayed traffic at the network layer without global time synchronization. Our software-router prototype can saturate a 10 Gbps link using only two CPU cores for packet processing.