1. Money Problem.
- Author
-
Hayes, Frank
- Subjects
- *
COMPUTER security , *INTERNET , *TCP/IP , *COMPUTER network protocols , *COMPUTER crimes - Abstract
The article discusses the two computer security problems which threaten the entire Internet. The easy one to fix is in Cisco routers and switches; Cisco has a patch that blocks the problem. The other vulnerability is with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the TCP in TCP/IP. Put simply, the TCP vulnerability makes it possible for an attacker to shut down a TCP session after guessing a random number. It could be used to shut down communication between two routers on an Internet backbone. That, in turn, could knock out whole chunks of the Internet until the routers recover and rebuild their routing tables. There are several fixes for this such as IPsec, RFC 1948, and RFC 2385. Some use encryption. But they all require trade-offs. With regards to the TCP flaw, the Internet backbone is largely at risk because the routers running it don't have the computing power to run encryption-based protocols like IPsec, which could block not only number-guessing attacks but many other threats as well. The authors says that what it would take to roll in faster hardware for all of the Internet's backbone routers is just money. The author concludes that if money is not appropriated for this problem, then there's no one else to blame when some number-guessing attacker brings down the Internet.
- Published
- 2004