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rfc:rfc4948

Network Working Group L. Andersson Request for Comments: 4948 Acreo AB Category: Informational E. Davies

                                                      Folly Consulting
                                                              L. Zhang
                                                                  UCLA
                                                           August 2007
 Report from the IAB workshop on Unwanted Traffic March 9-10, 2006

Status of This Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
 not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
 memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007).

Abstract

 This document reports the outcome of a workshop held by the Internet
 Architecture Board (IAB) on Unwanted Internet Traffic.  The workshop
 was held on March 9-10, 2006 at USC/ISI in Marina del Rey, CA, USA.
 The primary goal of the workshop was to foster interchange between
 the operator, standards, and research communities on the topic of
 unwanted traffic, as manifested in, for example, Distributed Denial
 of Service (DDoS) attacks, spam, and phishing, to gain understandings
 on the ultimate sources of these unwanted traffic, and to assess
 their impact and the effectiveness of existing solutions.  It was
 also a goal of the workshop to identify engineering and research
 topics that could be undertaken by the IAB, the IETF, the IRTF, and
 the network research and development community at large to develop
 effective countermeasures against the unwanted traffic.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

Table of Contents

 1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
 2.  The Root of All Evils: An Underground Economy  . . . . . . . .  4
   2.1.  The Underground Economy  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   2.2.  Our Enemy Using Our Networks, Our Tools  . . . . . . . . .  6
   2.3.  Compromised Systems Being a Major Source of Problems . . .  7
   2.4.  Lack of Meaningful Deterrence  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
   2.5.  Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
 3.  How Bad Is The Problem?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   3.1.  Backbone Providers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     3.1.1.  DDoS Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     3.1.2.  Problem Mitigation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   3.2.  Access Providers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   3.3.  Enterprise Networks: Perspective from a Large
         Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
   3.4.  Domain Name Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
 4.  Current Vulnerabilities and Existing Solutions . . . . . . . . 15
   4.1.  Internet Vulnerabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   4.2.  Existing Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     4.2.1.  Existing Solutions for Backbone Providers  . . . . . . 16
     4.2.2.  Existing Solutions for Enterprise Networks . . . . . . 17
   4.3.  Shortfalls in the Existing Network Protection  . . . . . . 18
     4.3.1.  Inadequate Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     4.3.2.  Inadequate Deployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     4.3.3.  Inadequate Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     4.3.4.  Is Closing Down Open Internet Access Necessary?  . . . 19
 5.  Active and Potential Solutions in the Pipeline . . . . . . . . 20
   5.1.  Central Policy Repository  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
   5.2.  Flow Based Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   5.3.  Internet Motion Sensor (IMS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   5.4.  BCP 38 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
   5.5.  Layer 5 to 7 Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
   5.6.  How To's . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
   5.7.  SHRED  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
 6.  Research in Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
   6.1.  Ongoing Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
     6.1.1.  Exploited Hosts  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
     6.1.2.  Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks . . . . . 25
     6.1.3.  Spyware  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
     6.1.4.  Forensic Aids  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
     6.1.5.  Measurements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
     6.1.6.  Traffic Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
     6.1.7.  Protocol and Software Security . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
   6.2.  Research on the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
     6.2.1.  Research and Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
     6.2.2.  Research and the Bad Guys  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 7.  Aladdin's Lamp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
   7.1.  Security Improvements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
   7.2.  Unwanted Traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
 8.  Workshop Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
   8.1.  Hard Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
   8.2.  Medium or Long Term Steps  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
   8.3.  Immediately Actionable Steps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
 9.  Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
 10. Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
 11. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
 12. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
 Appendix A.  Participants in the Workshop  . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
 Appendix B.  Workshop Agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
 Appendix C.  Slides  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

1. Introduction

 The Internet carries a lot of unwanted traffic today.  To gain a
 better understanding of the driving forces behind such unwanted
 traffic and to assess existing countermeasures, the IAB organized an
 "Unwanted Internet Traffic" workshop and invited experts on different
 aspects of unwanted traffic from operator, vendor, and research
 communities to the workshop.  The intention was to share information
 among people from different fields and organizations, fostering an
 interchange of experiences, views, and ideas between the various
 communities on this important topic.  The major goal of this workshop
 was to stimulate discussion at a deep technical level to assess
 today's situation in regards to:
 o  the kinds of unwanted traffic that are seen on the Internet,
 o  how bad the picture looks,
 o  who and where are the major sources of the problem,
 o  which solutions work and which do not, and
 o  what needs to be done.
 The workshop was very successful.  Over one and half days of
 intensive discussions, the major sources of the unwanted traffic were
 identified, and a critical assessment of the existing mitigation
 tools was conducted.  However, due to the limitation of available
 time, it was impossible to cover the topic of unwanted traffic in its
 entirety.  Thus, for some of the important issues, only the surface
 was touched.  Furthermore, because the primary focus of the workshop
 was to collect and share information on the current state of affairs,
 it is left as the next step to attempt to derive solutions to the

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 3] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 issues identified.  This will be done in part as activities within
 the IAB, the IETF, and the IRTF.
 During the workshop, a number of product and company names were
 cited, which are reflected in the report to a certain extent.
 However, a mention of any product in this report should not be taken
 as an endorsement of that product; there may well be alternative,
 equally relevant or efficacious products in the market place.
 This report is a summary of the contributions by the workshop
 participants, and thus it is not an IAB document.  The views and
 positions documented in the report do not necessarily reflect IAB
 views and positions.
 The workshop participant list is attached in Appendix A.  The agenda
 of the workshop can be found in Appendix B.  Links to a subset of the
 presentations are provided in Appendix C; the rest of the
 presentations are of a sensitive nature, and it has been agreed that
 they will not be made public.  Definitions of the jargon used in
 describing unwanted traffic can be found in Section 9.

2. The Root of All Evils: An Underground Economy

 The first important message this workshop would like to bring to the
 Internet community's attention is the existence of an underground
 economy.  This underground economy provides an enormous amount of
 monetary fuel that drives the generation of unwanted traffic.  This
 economic incentive feeds on an Internet that is to a large extent
 wide open.  The open nature of the Internet fosters innovations but
 offers virtually no defense against abuses.  It connects to millions
 of mostly unprotected hosts owned by millions of mostly naive users.
 These users explore and benefit from the vast opportunities offered
 by the new cyberspace, with little understanding of its vulnerability
 to abuse and the potential danger of their computers being
 compromised.  Moreover, the Internet was designed without built-in
 auditing trails.  This was an appropriate choice at the time, but now
 the lack of traceability makes it difficult to track down malicious
 activities.  Combined with a legal system that is yet to adapt to the
 new challenge of regulating the cyberspace, this means the Internet,
 as of today, has no effective deterrent to miscreants.  The
 unfettered design and freedom from regulation have contributed to the
 extraordinary success of the Internet.  At the same time, the
 combination of these factors has also led to an increasing volume of
 unwanted traffic.  The rest of this section provides a more detailed
 account of each of the above factors.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 4] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

2.1. The Underground Economy

 As in any economic system, the underground economy is regulated by a
 demand and supply chain.  The underground economy, which began as a
 barter system, has evolved into a giant shopping mall, commonly
 running on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) servers.  The IRC servers
 provide various online stores selling information about stolen credit
 cards and bank accounts, malware, bot code, botnets, root accesses to
 compromised hosts and web servers, and much more.  There are DDoS
 attack stores, credit card stores, PayPal and bank account stores, as
 well as Cisco and Juniper router stores that sell access to
 compromised routers.  Although not everything can be found on every
 server, most common tools used to operate in the underground economy
 can be found on almost all the servers.
 How do miscreants turn attack tools and compromised machines into
 real assets?  In the simplest case, miscreants electronically
 transfer money from stolen bank accounts directly to an account that
 they control, often in another country.  In a more sophisticated
 example, miscreants use stolen credit cards or PayPal accounts for
 online purchases.  To hide their trails, they often find remailers
 who receive the purchased goods and then repackage them to send to
 the miscreants for a fee.  The miscreants may also sell the goods
 through online merchandising sites such as eBay.  They request the
 payments be made in cashier checks or money orders to be sent to the
 people who provide money laundering services for the miscreants by
 receiving the payments and sending them to banks in a different
 country, again in exchange for a fee.  In either case, the
 destination bank accounts are used only for a short period and are
 closed as soon as the money is withdrawn by the miscreants.
 The miscreants obtain private and financial information from
 compromised hosts and install bots (a.k.a. zombies) on them.  They
 can also obtain such information from phishing attacks.  Spam
 messages mislead naive users into accessing spoofed web sites run by
 the miscreants where their financial information is extracted and
 collected.
 The miscreants in general are not skilled programmers.  With money,
 however, they can hire professional writers to produce well phrased
 spam messages, and hire coders to develop new viruses, worms,
 spyware, and botnet control packages, thereby resupplying the
 underground market with new tools that produce more unwanted traffic
 on the Internet: spam messages that spread phishing attacks, botnets
 that are used to launch DDoS attacks, click fraud that "earns" income
 by deceiving online commercial advertisers, and new viruses and worms
 that compromise more hosts and steal additional financial information
 as well as system passwords and personal identity information.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 5] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 The income gained from the above illegal activities allows miscreants
 to hire spammers, coders, and IRC server providers.  Spammers use
 botnets.  Direct marketing companies set up dirty affiliate programs.
 Some less than scrupulous banks are also involved to earn transaction
 fees from moving the dirty money around.  In the underground market,
 everything can be traded, and everything has a value.  Thus is
 spawned unwanted traffic of all kinds.
 The underground economy has evolved very rapidly over the past few
 years.  In the early days of bots and botnets, their activities were
 largely devoted to DDoS attacks and were relatively easy to detect.
 As the underground economy has evolved, so have the botnets.  They
 have moved from easily detectable behavior to masquerading as normal
 user network activity to achieve their goals, making detection very
 difficult even by vigilant system administrators.
 The drive for this rapid evolution comes to a large extent from the
 change in the intention of miscreant activity.  Early virus attacks
 and botnets were largely anarchic activities.  Many were done by
 "script kiddies" to disrupt systems without a real purpose or to
 demonstrate the prowess of the attacker, for example in compromising
 systems that were touted as "secure".  Mirroring the
 commercialization of the Internet and its increasing use for
 e-business, miscreant activity is now mostly focused on conventional
 criminal lines.  Systems are quietly subverted with the goal of
 obtaining illicit financial gain in the future, rather than causing
 visible disruptions as was often the aim of the early hackers.

2.2. Our Enemy Using Our Networks, Our Tools

 Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers are commonly used as the command
 and control channel for the underground market.  These servers are
 paid for by miscreants and are professionally supported.  They are
 advertised widely to attract potential consumers, and thus are easy
 to find.  The miscreants first talk to each other on the servers to
 find out who is offering what on the market, then exchange encrypted
 private messages to settle the deals.
 The miscreants are not afraid of network operators seeing their
 actions.  If their activities are interrupted, they simply move to
 another venue.  When ISPs take actions to protect their customers,
 revenge attacks are uncommon as long as the miscreants' cash flow is
 not disturbed.  When a botnet is taken out, they move on to the next
 one, as there is a plentiful supply.  However, if an IRC server is
 taken out that disturbs their cash flow, miscreants can be ruthless
 and severe attacks may follow.  They currently have no fear, as they
 know the chances of their being caught are minimal.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 6] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 Our enemies make good use of the Internet's global connectivity as
 well as all the tools the Internet has developed.  IRC servers
 provide a job market for the miscreants and shopping malls of attack
 tools.  Networking research has produced abundant results making it
 easier to build large scale distributed systems, and these have been
 adopted by miscreants to build large size, well-controlled botnets.
 Powerful search engines also enable one to quickly find readily
 available tools and resources.  The sophistication of attacks has
 increased with time, while the skills required to launch effective
 attacks have become minimal.  Attackers can be hiding anywhere in the
 Internet while attacks get launched on a global scale.

2.3. Compromised Systems Being a Major Source of Problems

 The current Internet provides a field ripe for exploitation.  The
 majority of end hosts run vulnerable platforms.  People from all
 walks of life eagerly jump into the newly discovered online world,
 yet without the proper training needed to understand the full
 implications.  This is at least partially due to most users failing
 to anticipate how such a great invention can be readily abused.  As a
 result, the Internet has ended up with a huge number of compromised
 hosts, without their owners being aware that it has happened.
 Unprotected hosts can be compromised in multiple ways.  Viruses and
 worms can get into the system through exploiting bugs in the existing
 operating systems or applications, sometimes even in anti-virus
 programs.  A phishing site may also take the opportunity to install
 malware on a victim's computer when a user is lured to the site.
 More recently, viruses have also started being propagated through
 popular peer-to-peer file sharing applications.  With multiple
 channels of propagation, malware has become wide-spread, and infected
 machines include not only home PCs (although they do represent a
 large percentage), but also corporate servers, and even government
 firewalls.
 News of new exploits of vulnerabilities of Microsoft Windows
 platforms is all too frequent, which leads to a common perception
 that the Microsoft Windows platform is a major source of
 vulnerability.  One of the reasons for the frequent vulnerability
 exploits of the Windows system is its popularity in the market place;
 thus, a miscreant's investment in each exploit can gain big returns
 from infecting millions of machines.  As a result, each incident is
 also likely to make headlines in the news.  In reality, all other
 platforms such as Linux, Solaris, and MAC OS for example, are also
 vulnerable to compromises.  Routers are not exempt from security
 break-ins either, and using a high-end router as a DoS launchpad can
 be a lot more effective than using a bundle of home PCs.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 7] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 Quietly subverting large numbers of hosts and making them part of a
 botnet, while leaving their normal functionality and connectivity
 essentially unimpaired, is now a major aim of miscreants and it
 appears that they are being all too successful.  Bots and the
 functions they perform are often hard to detect and most of the time
 their existence are not known to system operators or owners (hence,
 the alternative name for hosts infected with bots controlled by
 miscreants - zombies); by the time they are detected, it might very
 well be too late as they have carried out the intended
 (mal-)function.
 The existence of a large number of compromised hosts is a
 particularly challenging problem to the Internet's security.  Not
 only does the stolen financial information lead to enormous economic
 losses, but also there has been no quick fix to the problem.  As
 noted above, in many cases the owners of the compromised computers
 are unaware of the problem.  Even after being notified, some owners
 still do not care about fixing the problem as long as their own
 interest, such as playing online games, is not affected, even though
 the public interest is endangered --- large botnets can use multi-
 millions of such compromised hosts to launch DDoS attacks, with each
 host sending an insignificant amount of traffic but the aggregate
 exceeding the capacity of the best engineered systems.

2.4. Lack of Meaningful Deterrence

 One of the Internet's big strengths is its ability to provide
 seamless interconnection among an effectively unlimited number of
 parties.  However, the other side of the same coin is that there may
 not be clear ways to assign responsibilities when something goes
 wrong.  Taking DDoS attacks as an example, an attack is normally
 launched from a large number of compromised hosts, the attack traffic
 travels across the Internet backbone to the access network(s) linking
 to the victims.  As one can see, there are a number of independent
 stake-holders involved, and it is not immediately clear which party
 should take responsibility for resolving the problem.
 Furthermore, tracking down an attack is an extremely difficult task.
 The Internet architecture enables any IP host to communicate with any
 other hosts, and it provides no audit trails.  As a result, not only
 is there no limit to what a host may do, but also there is no trace
 after the event of what a host may have done.  At this time, there is
 virtually no effective tool available for problem diagnosis or packet
 trace back.  Thus, tracking down an attack is labor intensive and
 requires sophisticated skills.  As will be mentioned in the next
 section, there is also a lack of incentive to report security
 attacks.  Compounded with the high cost, these factors make forensic
 tracing of an attack to its root a rare event.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 8] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 In human society, the legal systems provide protection against
 criminals.  However, in the cyberspace, the legal systems are lagging
 behind in establishing regulations.  The laws and regulations aim at
 penalizing the conduct after the fact.  If the likelihood of
 detection is low, the deterrence would be minimal.  Many national
 jurisdictions have regulations about acts of computer fraud and
 abuse, and they often carry significant criminal penalties.  In the
 US (and many other places), it is illegal to access government
 computers without authorization, illegal to damage protected
 government computers, and illegal to access confidential information
 on protected computers.  However, the definition of "access" can be
 difficult to ascertain.  For example, is sending an ICMP (Internet
 Control Messaging Protocol) packet to a protected computer considered
 illegal access?  There is a lack of technical understanding among
 lawmakers that would be needed to specify the laws precisely and
 provide effective targeting limited to undesirable acts.  Computer
 fraud and liabilities laws provide a forum to address illegal access
 activities and enable prosecution of cybercriminals.  However, one
 difficulty in prosecuting affiliate programs using bot infrastructure
 is that they are either borderline legal, or there is little
 evidence.  There is also the mentality of taking legal action only
 when the measurable monetary damage exceeds a high threshold, while
 it is often difficult to quantify the monetary damage in individual
 cases of cyberspace crimes.
 There is a coalition between countries on collecting cybercriminal
 evidence across the world, but there is no rigorous way to trace
 across borders.  Laws and rules are mostly local to a country,
 policies (when they exist) are mostly enacted and enforced locally,
 while the Internet itself, that carries the unwanted traffic,
 respects no borders.  One estimate suggests that most players in the
 underground economy are outside the US, yet most IRC servers
 supporting the underground market may be running in US network
 providers, enjoying the reliable service and wide connectivity to the
 rest of the world provided by the networks.
 In addition, the definition of "unwanted" traffic also varies between
 different countries.  For example, China bans certain types of
 network traffic that are considered legitimate elsewhere.  Yet
 another major difficulty is the trade-off and blurred line between
 having audit trails to facilitate forensic analysis and to enforce
 censorship.  The greater ability we build into the network to control
 traffic, the stronger would be the monitoring requirements coming
 from the legislators.
 It should be emphasized that, while a legal system is necessary to
 create effective deterrence and sanctions against miscreants, it is
 by no means sufficient on its own.  Rather, it must be accompanied by

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 9] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 technical solutions to unwanted traffic detection and damage
 recovery.  It is also by no means a substitute for user education.
 Only a well informed user community can collectively establish an
 effective defense in the cyberspace.

2.5. Consequences

 What we have today is not a rosy picture: there are
 o  big economic incentives and a rich environment to exploit,
 o  no specific party to carry responsibility,
 o  no auditing system to trace back to the sources of attacks, and
 o  no well established legal regulations to punish offenders.
 The combination of these factors inevitably leads to ever increasing
 types and volume of unwanted traffic.  However, our real threats are
 not the bots or DDoS attacks, but the criminals behind them.
 Unwanted traffic is no longer only aiming for maximal disruption; in
 many cases, it is now a means to illicit ends with the specific
 purpose of generating financial gains for the miscreants.  Their
 crimes cause huge economic losses, counted in multiple billions of
 dollars and continuing.

3. How Bad Is The Problem?

 There are quite a number of different kinds of unwanted traffic on
 the Internet today; the discussions at this workshop were mainly
 around DDoS traffic and spam.  The impact of DDoS and spam on
 different parts of the network differs.  Below, we summarize the
 impact on backbone providers, access providers, and enterprise
 customers, respectively.

3.1. Backbone Providers

 Since backbone providers' main line of business is packet forwarding,
 the impact of unwanted traffic is mainly measured by whether DDoS
 traffic affects network availability.  Spam or malware is not a major
 concern because backbone networks do not directly support end users.
 Router compromises may exist, but they are rare events at this time.

3.1.1. DDoS Traffic

 Observation shows that, in the majority of DDoS attacks, attack
 traffic can originate from almost anywhere in the Internet.  In
 particular, those regions with high speed user connectivity but

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 10] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 poorly managed end hosts are often the originating sites of DDoS
 attacks.  The miscreants tend to find targets that offer maximal
 returns with minimal efforts.
 Backbone networks in general are well-provisioned in regard to
 traffic capacities.  Therefore, core routers and backbone link
 capacity do not get affected much by most DDoS attacks; a 5Gbps
 attack could be easily absorbed without causing noticeable impact on
 the performance of backbone networks.  However, DDoS attacks often
 saturate access networks and make a significant impact on customers.
 In particular, multihomed customers who have multiple well-
 provisioned connections for high throughput and performance may
 suffer from aggregated DDoS traffic coming in from all directions.

3.1.2. Problem Mitigation

 Currently, backbone networks do not have effective diagnosis or
 mitigation tools against DDoS attacks.  The foremost problem is a
 lack of incentives to deploy security solutions.  Because IP transit
 services are a commodity, controlling cost is essential to surviving
 the competition.  Thus, any expenditure tends to require a clearly
 identified return-on-investment (ROI).  Even when new security
 solutions become available, providers do not necessarily upgrade
 their infrastructure to deploy the solutions, as security solutions
 are often prevention mechanisms that may not have an easily
 quantifiable ROI.  To survive in the competitive environment in which
 they find themselves, backbone providers also try to recruit more
 customers.  Thus, a provider's reputation is important.  Due to the
 large number of attacks and inadequate security solution deployment,
 effective attacks and security glitches can be expected.  However, it
 is not in a provider's best interest to report all the observed
 attacks.  Instead, the provider's first concern is to minimize the
 number of publicized security incidents.  For example, a "trouble
 ticket" acknowledging the problem is issued only after a customer
 complains.  An informal estimate suggested that only about 10% of
 DDoS attacks are actually reported (some other estimates have put the
 figure as low as 2%).  In short, there is a lack of incentives to
 either report problems or deploy solutions.
 Partly as a consequence of the lack of incentive and lack of funding,
 there exist few DDoS mitigation tools for backbone providers.
 Network operators often work on their own time to fight the battle
 against malicious attacks.  Their primary mitigation tools today are
 Access Control Lists (ACL) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) null
 routes to black-hole unwanted traffic.  These tools can be turned on
 locally and do not require coordination across administrative
 domains.  When done at, or near, DDoS victims, these simple tools can
 have an immediate effect in reducing the DDoS traffic volume.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 11] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 However, these tools are rather rudimentary and inadequate, as we
 will elaborate in Section 4.2.1.

3.2. Access Providers

 A common issue that access providers share with backbone providers is
 the lack of incentive and the shortage of funding needed to deploy
 security solutions.  As with the situation with security incidents on
 the backbone, the number of security incidents reported by access
 providers is estimated to be significantly lower than the number of
 the actual incidents that occurred.
 Because access providers are directly connected to end customers,
 they also face unique problems of their own.  From the access
 providers' viewpoint, the most severe impact of unwanted traffic is
 not the bandwidth exhaustion, but the customer support load it
 engenders.  The primary impact of unwanted traffic is on end users,
 and access providers must respond to incident reports from their
 customers.  Today, access providers are playing the role of IT help
 desk for many of their customers, especially residential users.
 According to some access providers, during the Microsoft Blaster worm
 attack, the average time taken to handle a customer call was over an
 hour.  Due to the high cost of staffing the help desks, it is
 believed that, if a customer calls the help desk just once, the
 provider would lose the profit they would otherwise have otherwise
 made over the lifetime of that customer account.
 To reduce the high customer service cost caused by security breaches,
 most access providers offer free security software to their
 customers.  It is much cheaper to give the customer "free" security
 software in the hope of preventing system compromises than handling
 the system break-ins after the event.  However, perhaps due to their
 lack of understanding of the possible security problems they may
 face, many customers fail to install security software despite the
 free offer from their access providers, or even when they do, they
 may lack the skill needed to configure a complex system correctly.
 What factors may influence how quickly customers get the security
 breaches fixed?  Past experience suggests the following observations:
 o  Notification has little impact on end user repair behavior.
 o  There is no significant difference in terms of repair behavior
    between different industries or between business and home users.
 o  Users' patching behavior follows an exponential decay pattern with
    a time constant of approximately 40% per month.  Thus, about 40%
    of computers tend to be patched very quickly when a patch is

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 12] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

    released, and approximately 40% of the remaining vulnerable
    computers in each following month will show signs of being
    patched.  This leaves a few percent still unpatched after 6
    months.  In the very large population of Internet hosts, this
    results in a significant number of hosts that will be vulnerable
    for the rest of their life.
 o  There is a general lack of user understanding: after being
    compromised, unmanaged computers may get replaced rather than
    repaired, and this often results in infections occurring during
    the installation process on the replacement.

3.3. Enterprise Networks: Perspective from a Large Enterprise

 The operators of one big enterprise network reported their experience
 regarding unwanted traffic to the workshop.  Enterprises perceive
 many forms of bad traffic including worms, malware, spam, spyware,
 Instant Messaging (IM), peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, and DoS.
 Compared to backbone and access providers, enterprise network
 operators are more willing to investigate security breaches, although
 they may hesitate to pay a high price for security solutions.  False
 positives are very costly.  Most operators prefer false negatives to
 false positives.  In general, enterprises prefer prevention solutions
 to detection solutions.
 Deliberately created unwanted traffic (as opposed to unwanted traffic
 that might arise from misconfiguration) in enterprise networks can be
 sorted into three categories.  The first is "Nuisance", which
 includes unwanted traffic such as spam and peer-to-peer file sharing.
 Although there were different opinions among the workshop
 participants as to whether P2P traffic should, or should not, be
 considered as unwanted traffic, enterprise network operators are
 concerned not only that P2P traffic represents a significant share of
 the total network load, but they are also sensitive to potential
 copyright infringement issues that might lead to significant
 financial and legal impacts on the company as a whole.  In addition,
 P2P file sharing applications have also became a popular channel for
 malware propagation.
 The second category of unwanted traffic is labeled "Malicious", which
 includes the traffic that spreads malware.  This class of traffic can
 be small in volume but the cost from the resulting damage can be
 high.  The clean up after an incident also requires highly skilled
 operators.
 The third category of unwanted traffic is "Unknown": it is known that
 there exists a class of traffic in the network that can be best
 described in this way, as no one knows its purpose or the locations

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 13] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 of the sources.  Malicious traffic can be obscured by encryption,
 encapsulation, or covered up as legitimate traffic.  The existing
 detection tools are ineffective for this type of traffic.  Noisy
 worms are easy to identify, but stealth worms can open a backdoor on
 hosts and stay dormant for a long time without causing any noticeable
 detrimental effect.  This type of bad traffic has the potential to
 make the greatest impact on an enterprise from a threat perspective.
 There are more mitigation tools available for enterprise networks
 than for backbone and access network providers; one explanation might
 be the greater affordability of solutions for enterprise networks.
 The costs of damage from a security breach can also have a very
 significant impact on the profits of an enterprise.  At the same
 time, however, the workshop participants also expressed concerns
 regarding the ongoing arms race between security exploits and
 patching solutions.  Up to now, security efforts have, by and large,
 been reactive, creating a chain of security exploits and a consequent
 stream of "fixes".  Such a reactive mode has not only created a big
 security market, but also does not enable us to get ahead of
 attackers.

3.4. Domain Name Services

 Different from backbone and access providers, there also exists a
 class of Internet service infrastructure providers.  Provision of
 Domain Name System (DNS) services offers an example here.  As
 reported by operators from a major DNS hosting company, over time
 there have been increasingly significant DDoS attacks on .com, .net
 and root servers.
 DNS service operators have witnessed large scale DDoS attacks.  The
 most recent ones include reflection attacks resulting from queries
 using spoofed source addresses.  The major damage caused by these
 attacks are bandwidth and resource exhaustion, which led to
 disruption of critical services.  The peak rate of daily DNS
 transactions has been growing at a much faster rate than the number
 of Internet users, and this trend is expected to continue.  The heavy
 load on the DNS servers has led to increasing complexity in providing
 the services.
 In addition to intentional DDoS Attacks, some other causes of the
 heavy DNS load included (1) well known bugs in a small number of DNS
 servers that still run an old version of the BIND software, causing
 significant load increase at top level servers; and (2)
 inappropriately configured firewalls that allow DNS queries to come
 out but block returning DNS replies, resulting in big adverse impacts
 on the overall system.  Most of such issues have been addressed in
 the DNS operational guidelines drafted by the IETF DNS Operations

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 14] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 Working Group; however, many DNS operators have not taken appropriate
 actions.
 At this time, the only effective and viable mitigation approach is
 over-engineering the DNS service infrastructure by increasing link
 bandwidth, the number of servers, and the server processing power, as
 well as deploying network anycast.  There is a concern about whether
 the safety margin gained from over-engineering is, or is not,
 adequate in sustaining DNS services over future attacks.  Looking
 forward, there are also a few new issues looming.  Two imminent ones
 are the expected widespread deployment of IPv6 whose new DNS software
 would inevitably contain new bugs, and the DNS Security Extensions
 (DNSSEC), which could potentially be abused to generate DDoS attacks.

4. Current Vulnerabilities and Existing Solutions

 This section summarizes three aspects of the workshop discussions.
 We first collected the major vulnerabilities mentioned in the
 workshop, then made a summary of the existing solutions, and followed
 up with an examination of the effectiveness, or lack of it, of the
 existing solutions.

4.1. Internet Vulnerabilities

 Below is a list of known Internet vulnerabilities and issues around
 unwanted traffic.
 o  Packet source address spoofing: there has been speculation that
    attacks using spoofed source addresses are decreasing, due to the
    proliferation of botnets, which can be used to launch various
    attacks without using spoofed source addresses.  It is certainly
    true that not all the attacks use spoofed addresses; however, many
    attacks, especially reflection attacks, do use spoofed source
    addresses.
 o  BGP route hijacking: in a survey conducted by Arbor Networks,
    route hijacking together with source address spoofing are listed
    as the two most critical vulnerabilities on the Internet.  It has
    been observed that miscreants hijack bogon prefixes for spam
    message injections.  Such hijacks do not affect normal packet
    delivery and thus have a low chance of being noticed.
 o  Everything over HTTP: port scan attacks occur frequently in
    today's Internet, looking for open TCP or UDP ports through which
    to gain access to computers.  The reaction from computer system
    management has been to close down all the unused ports, especially
    in firewalls.  One result of this reaction is that application
    designers have moved to transporting all data communications over

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 15] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

    HTTP to avoid firewall traversal issues.  Transporting "everything
    over HTTP" does not block attacks but has simply moved the
    vulnerability from one place to another.
 o  Everyone comes from Everywhere: in the earlier life of the
    Internet it had been possible to get some indication of the
    authenticity of traffic from a specific sender based for example
    on the Time To Live (TTL).  The TTL would stay almost constant
    when traffic from a certain sender to a specific host entered an
    operators network, since the sender will "always" set the TTL to
    the same value.  If a change in the TTL value occurred without an
    accompanying change in the routing, one could draw the conclusion
    that this was potential unwanted traffic.  However, since hosts
    have become mobile, they may be roaming within an operator's
    network and the resulting path changes may put more (or less) hops
    between the source and the destination.  Thus, it is no longer
    possible to interpret a change in the TTL value, even if it occurs
    without any corresponding change in routing, as an indication that
    the traffic has been subverted.
 o  Complex Network Authentication: Network authentication as it is
    used today is far too complex to be feasible for users to use
    effectively.  It will also be difficult to make it work with new
    wireless access technologies.
       A possible scenario envisages a customers handset that is
       initially on a corporate wireless network.  If that customer
       steps out of the corporate building, the handset may get
       connected to the corporate network through a GPRS network.  The
       handset may then roam to a wireless LAN network when the user
       enters a public area with a hotspot.  Consequently, we need
       authentication tools for cases when the underlying data link
       layer technology changes quickly, possibly during a single
       application session.
 o  Unused Security Tools: Vendors and standards have produced quite a
    number of useful security tools; however, not all, or even most,
    of them get used extensively.

4.2. Existing Solutions

4.2.1. Existing Solutions for Backbone Providers

 Several engineering solutions exist that operators can deploy to
 defend the network against unwanted traffic.  Adequate provisioning
 is one commonly used approach that can diminish the impact of DDoS on
 the Internet backbone.  The solution that received most mentions at
 the workshop was BCP 38 on ingress filtering: universal deployment of

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 16] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 BCP 38 can effectively block DDoS attacks using spoofed source IP
 addresses.  At present, Access Control List (ACL) and BGP null
 routing are the two tools most commonly used by network operators to
 mitigate DDoS attacks.  They are effective in blocking DDoS attacks,
 especially when being applied at or near a victim's site.
 Unfortunately, BCP 38 is not widely deployed today.  BCP 38 may
 require device upgrades, and is considered tedious to configure and
 maintain.  Although widespread deployment of BCP 38 could benefit the
 Internet as a whole, deployment by individual sites imposes a certain
 amount of cost to the site, and does not provide a direct and
 tangible benefit in return.  In other words, BCP 38 suffers from a
 lack of deployment incentives.
 Both BGP null routing and ACL have the drawback of relying on manual
 configuration and thus are labor intensive.  In addition, they also
 suffer from blocking both attack and legitimate packets.  There is
 also a potential that some tools could back-fire, e.g., an overly
 long ACL list might significantly slow down packet forwarding in a
 router.
 Unicast Reverse Path Filtering (uRPF), which is available on some
 routers, provides a means of implementing a restricted form of BCP 38
 ingress filtering without the effort of maintaining ACLs. uRPF uses
 the routing table to check that a valid path back to the source
 exists.  However, its effectiveness depends on the specificity of the
 routes against which source addresses are compared.  The prevalence
 of asymmetric routing means that the strict uRPF test (where the
 route to the source must leave from the same interface on which the
 packet being tested arrived) may have to be replaced by the loose
 uRPF test (where the route may leave from any interface).  The loose
 uRPF test is not a guarantee against all cases of address spoofing,
 and it may still be necessary to maintain an ACL to deal with
 exceptions.

4.2.2. Existing Solutions for Enterprise Networks

 A wide variety of commercial products is available for enterprise
 network protection.  Three popular types of protection mechanisms are
 o  Firewalls: firewalls are perhaps the most widely deployed
    protection products.  However, the effectiveness of firewalls in
    protecting enterprise confidential information can be weakened by
    spyware installed internally, and they are ineffective against
    attacks carried out from inside the perimeter established by the
    firewalls.  Too often, spyware installation is a byproduct of
    installing other applications permitted by end users.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 17] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 o  Application level gateways: these are becoming more widely used.
    However, because they require application-specific support, and in
    many cases they cache all the in-flight documents, configuration
    can be difficult and the costs high.  Thus, enterprise network
    operators prefer network level protections over layer-7 solutions.
 o  Anti-spam software: Anti-spam measures consume significant human
    resources.  Current spam mitigation tools include blacklists and
    content filters.  The more recent "learning" filters may help
    significantly reduce the human effort needed and decrease the
    number of both false positives and negatives.
 A more recent development is computer admission control, where a
 computer is granted network access if and only if it belongs to a
 valid user and appears to have the most recent set of security
 patches installed.  It is however a more expensive solution.  A major
 remaining issue facing enterprise network operators is how to solve
 the user vulnerability problem and reduce reliance on user's
 understanding of the need for security maintenance.

4.3. Shortfalls in the Existing Network Protection

4.3.1. Inadequate Tools

 Generally speaking, network and service operators do not have
 adequate tools for network problem diagnosis.  The current approaches
 largely rely on the experience and skills of the operators, and on
 time-consuming manual operations.  The same is true for mitigation
 tools against attacks.

4.3.2. Inadequate Deployments

 The limited number of existing Internet protection measures have not
 been widely deployed.  Deployment of security solutions requires
 resources which may not be available.  It also requires education
 among the operational community to recognize the critical importance
 of patch installation and software upgrades; for example, a bug in
 the BIND packet was discovered and fixed in 2003, yet a number of DNS
 servers still run the old software today.  Perhaps most importantly,
 a security solution must be designed with the right incentives to
 promote their deployment.  Effective protection also requires
 coordination between competing network providers.  For the time
 being, it is often difficult to even find the contact information for
 operators of other networks.
 A number of workshop participants shared the view that, if all the
 known engineering approaches and bug fixes were universally deployed,
 the Internet could have been enjoying a substantially reduced number

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 18] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 of security problems today.  In particular, the need for, and lack
 of, BCP 38 deployment was mentioned numerous times during the
 workshop.  There is also a lack of enthusiasm about the routing
 security requirements document being developed by the IETF RPSEC
 (Routing Protocol Security) Working Group, which focuses heavily on
 cryptographically-based protection requirements.  Not only would
 cryptographically-based solutions face the obstacle of funding for
 deployment, but also they are likely to bring with them their own set
 of problems.

4.3.3. Inadequate Education

 There exists an educational challenge to disseminate the knowledge
 needed for secure Internet usage and operations.  Easily guessed
 passwords and plaintext password transmission are still common in
 many parts of the Internet.  One common rumor claims that Cisco
 routers were shipped with a default password "cisco" and this was
 used by attackers to break into routers.  In reality, operators often
 configure Cisco routers with that password, perhaps because of the
 difficulty of disseminating passwords to multiple maintainers.  A
 similar problem exists for Juniper routers and other vendors'
 products.
 How to provide effective education to the Internet user community at
 large remains a great challenge.  As mentioned earlier in this
 report, the existence of a large number of compromised hosts is one
 major source of the unwanted traffic problem, and the ultimate
 solution to this problem is a well-informed, vigilant user community.

4.3.4. Is Closing Down Open Internet Access Necessary?

 One position made at the workshop is that, facing the problems of
 millions of vulnerable computers and lack of effective deterrence,
 protecting the Internet might require a fundamental change to the
 current Internet architecture, by replacing unconstrained open access
 to the Internet with strictly controlled access.  Although the
 participants held different positions on this issue, a rough
 consensus was reached that, considering the overall picture,
 enforcing controlled access does not seem the best solution to
 Internet protection.  Instead, the workshop identified a number of
 needs that should be satisfied to move towards a well protected
 Internet:
 o  the need for risk assessment for service providers; at this time,
    we lack a commonly agreed bar for security assurance;
 o  the need to add traceability to allow tracking of abnormal
    behavior in the network, and

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 19] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 o  the need for liability if someone fails to follow recommended
    practices.
 Adding traceability has been difficult due to the distributed nature
 of the Internet.  Collaboration among operators is a necessity in
 fighting cybercrimes.  We must also pay attention to preparation for
 the next cycle of miscreant activity, and not devote all our efforts
 to fixing the existing problems.  As discussed above, the current
 reactive approach to security problems is not a winning strategy.

5. Active and Potential Solutions in the Pipeline

 This section addresses the issues that vendors recognized as
 important and for which there will be solutions available in the near
 future.
 There are a number of potential solutions that vendors are working
 on, but are not yet offering as part of their product portfolio, that
 will allegedly remedy or diagnose the problems described in
 Section 4.1.
 Inevitably, when vendors have or are about to make a decision on
 implementing new features in their products but have not made any
 announcement, the vendors are not willing to talk about the new
 features openly, which limits what can be said in this section.

5.1. Central Policy Repository

 One idea is to build a Central Policy Repository that holds policies
 that are known to work properly, e.g., policies controlling from whom
 one would accept traffic when under attack.  This repository could,
 for example, keep information on which neighbor router or AS is doing
 proper ingress address filtering.  The repository could also hold the
 configurations that operators use to upgrade configurations on their
 routers.
 If such a repository is to be a shared resource used by multiple
 operators, it will necessarily require validation and authentication
 of the stored policies to ensure that the repository does not become
 the cause of vulnerabilities.  Inevitably, this would mean that the
 information comes with a cost and it will only be viable if the sum
 of the reductions in individual operators' costs is greater than the
 costs of maintaining the repository.

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5.2. Flow Based Tools

 A set of tools based on flow data is widely used to extract
 information from both network and data link layers.  Tools have been
 built that can be used to find out the sources of almost any type of
 traffic, including certain unwanted traffic.  These flow-based tools
 make it possible to do things like DDoS traceback, traffic/peering
 analyses, and detection of botnets, worms, and spyware.
 These tools monitor flows on the network and build baselines for what
 is the "normal" behavior.  Once the baseline is available, it is
 possible to detect anomalous activity.  It is easy to detect
 variations over time, and decide if the variation is legitimate or
 not.  It is possible to take this approach further, typically
 involving the identification of signatures of particular types of
 traffic.
 These flow-based tools are analogous to the "sonar" that is used by
 navies to listen for submarines.  Once a particular submarine is
 identified, it is possible to record its sonar signature to be used
 to provide rapid identification in the future when the same submarine
 is encountered again.
 Examples of existing tools include
 Cisco IOS NetFlow <http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6601/
 products_ios_protocol_group_home.html>,
 sFlow <http://www.sflow.org/>, and
 NeTraMet <http://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/netramet/> based on
 the IETF RTFM and IPFIX standards.
 There are also tools for working with the output of NetFlow such as
 jFlow <http://www.net-track.ch/opensource/jflow/> and
 Arbor Networks' Peakflow
 <http://www.arbor.net/products_platform.php>.
 The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)
 maintains a taxonomy of available tools on its web site at
 <http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/index.xml>.

5.3. Internet Motion Sensor (IMS)

 The Internet Motion Sensor (IMS) [IMS] may be used to watch traffic
 to or from "Darknets" (routable prefixes that don't have end hosts
 attached), unassigned address spaces, and unannounced address spaces.
 By watching activities in these types of address spaces, one can
 understand and detect, e.g., scanning activities, DDoS worms, worm
 infected hosts, and misconfigured hosts.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 21] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 Currently, the IMS is used to monitor approximately 17 million
 prefixes, about 1.2% of the IPv4 address space.  The use of IMS has
 highlighted two major characteristics of attacks; malicious attacks
 are more targeted than one might have assumed, and a vulnerability in
 a system does not necessarily lead to a threat to that system (e.g.,
 the vulnerability may not be exploited to launch attacks if the
 perceived "benefit" to the attacker appears small).  Data from IMS
 and other sources indicates that attackers are making increased use
 of information from social networking sites to target their attacks
 and select perceived easy targets, such as computers running very old
 versions of systems or new, unpatched vulnerabilities.
 This form of passive data collection is also known as a "Network
 Telescope".  Links to similar tools can be found on the CAIDA web
 site at <http://www.caida.org/data/passive/network_telescope.xml>.

5.4. BCP 38

 In the year 2000, the IETF developed a set of recommendations to
 limit DOS attacks and Address Spoofing published as BCP 38 [RFC2827],
 "Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which
 employ IP Source Address Spoofing".  However, up to now BCP 38
 capabilities still have not been widely deployed, perhaps due to the
 incentive issue discussed earlier.
 The IETF has also developed an additional set of recommendations
 extending BCP 38 to multihomed networks.  These recommendations are
 published as BCP 84 [RFC3704].

5.5. Layer 5 to 7 Awareness

 Tools are being developed that will make it possible to perform deep
 packet inspection at high speed.  Some companies are working on
 hardware implementation to inspect all layers from 2 to 7 (e.g.,
 EZchip <http://www.ezchip.com/t_npu_whpaper.htm>).  A number of other
 companies, including Cisco and Juniper, offer tools capable of
 analyzing packets at the transport layer and above.

5.6. How To's

 One idea that was discussed at the workshop envisaged operators and
 standards bodies cooperating to produce a set of "How To" documents
 as guidelines on how to configure networks.  Dissemination and use of
 these "How To's" should be encouraged by vendors, operators, and
 standards bodies.

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 This type of initiative needs a "sponsor" or "champion" that takes
 the lead and starts collecting a set of "How To's" that could be
 freely distributed.  The workshop did not discuss this further.

5.7. SHRED

 Methods to discourage the dissemination of spam by punishing the
 spammers, such as Spam Harassment Reduction via Economic Disincentive
 (SHRED) [SHRED], were discussed.  The idea is to make it increasingly
 expensive for spammers to use the email system, while normal users
 retain what they have come to expect as normal service.  There was no
 agreement on the effectiveness of this type of system.

6. Research in Progress

 In preparation for this session, several researchers active in
 Internet Research were asked two rather open ended questions: "Where
 is the focus on Internet research today?" and "Where should it be?"
 A summary of the answers to these questions is given below.
 Section 6.2.2 covers part of the relationship between research and
 miscreants.  For example, research activities in each area (please
 refer to the slide set for Workshop Session 8 which can be found at
 the link referred to in Appendix C).

6.1. Ongoing Research

 Section 6.1 discusses briefly areas where we see active research on
 unwanted traffic today.

6.1.1. Exploited Hosts

 One area where researchers are very active is analyzing situations
 where hosts are exploited.  This has been a major focus for a long
 time, and an abundance of reports have been published.  Current
 research may be divided into three different categories: prevention,
 detection, and defense.

6.1.1.1. Prevention

 Code quality is crucial when it comes to preventing exploitation of
 Internet hosts.  Quite a bit of research effort has therefore gone
 into improvement of code quality.  Researchers are looking into
 automated methods for finding bugs and maybe in the end fixes for any
 bugs detected.
 A second approach designed to stop hosts from becoming compromised is
 to reduce the "attack surface".  Researchers are thinking about

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 23] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 changes or extensions to the Internet architecture.  The idea is to
 create a strict client server architecture, where the clients only
 are allowed to initiate connections, and while servers may only
 accept connections.
 Researchers have put a lot of effort into better scaling of honey
 pots and honey farms to better understand and neutralize the methods
 miscreants are using to exploit hosts.  Research also goes into
 developing honey monkeys in order to understand how hosts are
 vulnerable.  Both honey pots/farms and honey monkeys are aimed at
 taking measures that prevent further (mis-)use of possible exploits.

6.1.1.2. Detection

 When an attack is launched against a computer system, the attack
 typically leaves evidence of the intrusion in the system logs.  Each
 type of intrusion leaves a specific kind of footprint or signature.
 The signature can be evidence that certain software has been
 executed, that logins have failed, that administrative privileges
 have been misused, or that particular files and directories have been
 accessed.  Administrators can document these attack signatures and
 use them to detect the same type of attack in the future.  This
 process can be automated.
 Because each signature is different, it is possible for system
 administrators to determine by looking at the intrusion signature
 what the intrusion was, how and when it was perpetrated, and even how
 skilled the intruder is.
 Once an attack signature is available, it can be used to create a
 vulnerability filter, i.e., the stored attack signature is compared
 to actual events in real time and an alarm is given when this pattern
 is repeated.
 A further step may be taken with automated vulnerability signatures,
 i.e., when a new type of attack is found, a vulnerability filter is
 automatically created.  This vulnerability filter can be made
 available for nodes to defend themselves against this new type of
 attack.  The automated vulnerability signatures may be part of an
 Intrusion Detection System (IDS).

6.1.1.3. Defense

 An IDS can be a part of the defense against actual attacks, e.g., by
 using vulnerability filters.  An Intrusion Detection System (IDS)
 inspects inbound and outbound network activities and detects
 signatures that indicate that a system is under attack from someone
 attempting to break into or compromise the system.

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6.1.2. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

 Research on DDoS attacks follows two separate approaches, the first
 has the application as its focus, while the second focuses on the
 network.

6.1.2.1. Application Oriented DDoS Research

 The key issue with application oriented research is to distinguish
 between legitimate activities and attacks.  Today, several tools
 exist that can do this and research has moved on to more advanced
 things.
 Research today looks into tools that can detect and filter activities
 that have been generated by bots and botnets.
 One approach is to set up a tool that sends challenges to senders
 that want to send traffic to a certain node.  The potential sender
 then has to respond correctly to that challenge; otherwise, the
 traffic will be filtered out.
 The alternative is to get more capacity between sender and receiver.
 This is done primarily by some form of use of peer-to-peer
 technology.
 Today, there is "peer-to-peer hype" in the research community; a sure
 way of making yourself known as a researcher is to publish something
 that solves old problems by means of some peer-to-peer technology.
 Proposals now exist for peer-to-peer DNS, peer-to-peer backup
 solutions, peer-to-peer web-cast, etc.  Whether these proposals can
 live up to the hype remains to be seen.

6.1.2.2. Network Oriented DDoS Research

 Research on DDoS attacks that takes a network oriented focus may be
 described by the following oversimplified three steps.
 1.  Find the bad stuff
 2.  Set the "evil bit" on those packets
 3.  Filter out the packets with the "evil bit" set
 This rather uncomplicated scheme has to be carried out on high-speed
 links and interfaces.  Automation is the only way of achieving this.
 One way of indirectly setting the "evil bit" is to use a normalized
 TTL.  The logic goes: the TTL for traffic from this sender has always

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 25] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 been "x", but has now suddenly become "y", without any corresponding
 change in routing.  The conclusion is that someone is masquerading as
 the legitimate sender.  Traffic with the "y" TTL is filtered out.
 Another idea is to give traffic received from ISPs that are known to
 do source address validation the "red carpet treatment", i.e., to set
 the "good bit".  When an attack is detected, traffic from everyone
 that doesn't have the "good bit" is filtered out.  Apart from
 reacting to the attack, this also give ISPs an incentive to do source
 address validation.  If they don't do it, their peers won't set the
 "good bit" and the ISP's customers will suffer, dragging down their
 reputation.
 Overlay networks can also be used to stop a DDoS attack.  The idea
 here is that traffic is not routed directly to the destination.
 Instead, it is hidden behind some entry points in the overlay.  The
 entry points make sure the sender is the host he claims he is, and in
 that case, marks the packet with a "magic bit".  Packets lacking the
 "magic bit" are not forwarded on the overlay.  This has good scaling
 properties; you only need to have enough capacity to tag the amount
 of traffic you want to receive, not the amount you actually receive.

6.1.3. Spyware

 Current research on spyware and measurements of spyware are aiming to
 find methods to understand when certain activities associated with
 spyware happen and to understand the impact of this activity.
 There are a number of research activities around spyware, e.g.,
 looking into threats caused by spyware; however, these were only
 briefly touched upon at the workshop.

6.1.4. Forensic Aids

 Lately, research has started to look into tools and support to answer
 the "What happened here?" question.  These tools are called "forensic
 aids", and can be used to "recreate" an illegal activity just as the
 police do when working on a crime scene.
 The techniques that these forensic aids take as their starting point
 involve the identification of a process or program that should not be
 present on a computer.  The effort goes into building tools and
 methods that can trace the intruder back to its origin.  Methods to
 understand how a specific output depends on a particular input also
 exist.

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6.1.5. Measurements

 Measurements are always interesting for the research community,
 because they generate new data.  Consequently, lots of effort goes
 into specifying how measurements should be performed and into
 development of measurement tools.  Measurements have been useful in
 creating effective counter-measures against worms.  Before
 measurements gave actual data of how worms behave, actions taken
 against worms were generally ineffective.

6.1.6. Traffic Analysis

 One aspect of research that closely relates to measurements is
 analysis.  Earlier, it was common to look for the amount of traffic
 traversing certain transport ports.  Lately, it has become common to
 tunnel "everything" over something else, and a shift has occurred
 towards looking for behavior and/or content.  When you see a certain
 behavior or content over a protocol that is not supposed to behave in
 this way, it is likely that something bad is going on.
 Since this is an arms race, the miscreants that use tunneling
 protocols have started to mimic the pattern of something that is
 acceptable.

6.1.7. Protocol and Software Security

 The general IETF design guidelines for robust Internet protocols
 says: "Be liberal in what you receive and conservative in what you
 send".  The downside is that most protocols believe what they get and
 as a consequence also get what they deserve.  The IAB is intending to
 work on new design guidelines, e.g., rules of thumb and things you do
 and things you don't.  This is not ready yet, but will be offered as
 input to a BCP in due course.
 An area where there is a potential overlap between standards people
 and researchers is protocol analysis languages.  The protocol
 analysis languages could be used, for example, look for
 vulnerabilities.

6.2. Research on the Internet

 The workshop discussed the interface between people working in
 standardization organizations in general and IETF in particular on
 the one hand and people working with research on the other.  The
 topic of discussion was broader than just "Unwanted traffic".  Three
 topics were touched on: what motivates researchers, how to attract
 researchers to problems that are hindering or have been discovered in

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 27] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 the context of standardization, and the sometimes rocky relations
 between the research community and the "bad boys".

6.2.1. Research and Standards

 The workshop discussed how research and standardization could
 mutually support each other.  Quite often there is a commonality of
 interest between the two groups.  The IAB supports the Internet
 Research Task Force (IRTF) as a venue for Internet research.  The
 delta between what is done and what could be is still substantial.
 The discussion focused on how standardization in general and the IETF
 in particular can get help from researchers.
 Since standardization organizations don't have the economic strength
 to simply finance the research they need or want, other means have to
 be used.  One is to correctly and clearly communicate problems,
 another is to supply adequate and relevant information.
 To attract the research community to work with standardization
 organizations, it is necessary to identify the real problems and
 state them in such a way that they are amenable to solution.  General
 unspecified problems are of no use, e.g., "This is an impossible
 problem!" or "All the problems are because my users behave badly!"
 Instead, saying "This is an absolutely critical problem, and we have
 no idea how to solve it!" is much more attractive.
 The potential research problem should also be communicated in a way
 that is public.  A researcher that wants to take on a problem is
 helped if she/he can point at a slide from NANOG or RIPE that
 identifies this problem.
 The way researchers go about solving problems is basically to
 identify all the existing constraints, and then relax one of the
 constraints and see what happens.  Therefore, rock solid constraints
 are a show stopper, e.g., "We can't do that, because it has to go
 into an ASIC!".  Real constraints have to be clearly communicated to
 and understood by the researcher.
 One reasonable way of fostering cooperation is to entice two or three
 people and have them write a paper on the problem.  What will happen
 then is that this paper will be incrementally improved by other
 researchers.  The vast majority of all research goes into improving
 on someone else's paper.
 A second important factor is to supply sufficient relevant
 information.  New information that suggests possible ways to address
 new problems or improve on old or partial solutions to previously

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 28] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 investigated problems are attractive.  Often, understanding of
 important problems comes from the operator community; when trying to
 initiate research from a standards perspective, keeping operators in
 the loop may be beneficial.
 Today, the research community is largely left on its own, and
 consequently tends to generate essentially random, untargeted
 results.  If the right people in the standards community say the
 right things to the right people in the research community, it can
 literally focus hundreds of graduate students on a single problem.
 Problem statements and data are needed.

6.2.2. Research and the Bad Guys

 A general problem with all research and development is that what can
 be used may also be misused.  In some cases, miscreants have received
 help from research that was never intended.
 There are several examples of Free Nets, i.e., networks designed to
 allow end-users to participate without revealing their identity or
 how and where they are connected to the network.  The Free Nets are
 designed based on technologies such as onion routing or mix networks.
 Free Nets create anonymity that allows people to express opinions
 without having to reveal their true identity and thus can be used to
 promote free speech.  However, these are tools that can also work
 just as well to hide illegal activities in democracies.
 Mix networks create hard-to-trace communications by using a chain of
 proxy servers.  A message from a sender to a receiver passes by the
 chain of proxies.  A message is encrypted with a layered encryption
 where each layer is understood by only one of the proxies in the
 chain; the actual message is the innermost layer.  A mix network will
 achieve untraceable communication, even if all but one of the proxies
 are compromised by a potential tracer.
 Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a
 computer network; it is a technique that encodes routing information
 in a set of encrypted layers.  Onion routing is a further development
 of mix networks.
 Research projects have resulted in methods for distributed command
 and control, e.g., in the form of Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) and
 gossip protocols.  This of course has legitimate uses, e.g., for
 security and reliability applications, but it also is extremely
 useful for DDoS attacks and unwanted traffic in general.
 A lot of effort has gone into research around worms, the result is
 that we have a very good understanding of the characteristics of the

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 29] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 technology associated with worms and how they behave.  This is a very
 good basis when we want to protect against worms.  The downside is
 that researchers also understand how to implement future worms,
 including knowledge on how to design faster worms that won't leave a
 footprint.

7. Aladdin's Lamp

 If we had an Aladdin's Lamp and could be granted anything we wanted
 in the context of remedying unwanted traffic or effects of such
 traffic - what would we wish for?  The topic of this session was
 wishes, i.e., loosening the constraints that depend on what we have
 and focus on what we really want.
 There certainly are lots of "wishes" around, not least of which is
 making things simpler and safer.  On the other hand, very few of
 these wishes are clearly stated.  One comment on this lack of clarity
 was that we are too busy putting out the fires of today and don't
 have the time to be thinking ahead.

7.1. Security Improvements

 Operators at the workshop expressed a number of wishes that, if
 fulfilled, would help to improve and simplify security.  The list
 below contains a number of examples of actions that ought to improve
 security.  The content is still at the "wish-level", i.e., no effort
 has gone in to trying to understand the feasibility of realizing
 these wishes.
 Wish: Reliable point of contact in each administrative domain for
 security coordination.
 First and foremost, operators would like to see correct and complete
 contact information to coordinate security problems across operators.
 The "whois" database of registration details for IP addresses and
 Autonomous System numbers held by Regional Internet Registries (e.g.,
 ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) was intended to be a directory for this type of
 information, and RFC 2142 [RFC2142] established common mailbox names
 for certain roles and services.  There are several reasons why these
 tools are largely unused, including unwanted traffic.
 Wish: Organized testing for security.
 Today, new hardware and software are extensively tested for
 performance.  There is almost no testing of this hardware and
 software for security.

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 Wish: Infrastructure or test bed for security.
 It would be good to have an organized infrastructure or test bed for
 testing of security for new products.
 Wish: Defaults for security.
 Equipment and software should come with a simple and effective
 default setting for security.
 Wish: Shared information regarding attacks.
 It would be useful to have an automated sharing mechanism for
 attacks, vulnerabilities, and sources of threats between network
 users and providers in order to meet attacks in a more timely and
 efficient manner.

7.2. Unwanted Traffic

 Wish: Automatic filtering of unwanted traffic.
 It would be useful, not least for enterprises, to have mechanisms
 that would automatically filter out the unwanted traffic.
 Some filtering of spam, viruses, and malware that is sent by email is
 already practicable but inevitably is imperfect because it mainly
 relies on "heuristics" to identify the unwanted traffic.  This is
 another example of the "arms race" between filtering and the
 ingenuity of spammers trying to evade the filters.  This "wish" needs
 to be further discussed and developed to make it something that could
 be turned into practical ideas.
 Wish: Fix Spam.
 A large fraction of the email traffic coming into enterprises today
 is spam, and consequently any fixes to the spam problem are very high
 on their priority list.

8. Workshop Summary

 The workshop spent its last two hours discussing the following
 question: What are the engineering (immediate and longer term) and
 research issues that might be pursued within the IETF and the IRTF,
 and what actions could the IAB take?  The suggested actions can be
 summarized into three classes.

8.1. Hard Questions

 The discussions during this concluding section raised a number of
 questions that touched upon the overall network architecture designs.
 o  What should be the roles of cryptographic mechanisms in the
    overall Internet architecture?  For example, do we need to apply

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 31] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

    cryptographic mechanisms to harden the shell, or rely on deep
    packet inspection to filter out bad traffic?
 o  To add effective protection to the Internet, how far are we
    willing to go in
  • curtailing its openness, and
  • increasing the system complexity?
    And what architectural principles do we need to preserve as we go
    along these paths?
 o  A simple risk analysis would suggest that an ideal attack target
    of minimal cost but maximal disruption is the core routing
    infrastructure.  However, do we really need an unlinked and
    separately managed control plane to secure it?  This requires a
    deep understanding of the architectural design trade-offs.
 o  Can we, and how do we, change the economic substructure?  A
    special workshop was suggested as a next step to gain a better
    understanding of the question.

8.2. Medium or Long Term Steps

 While answering the above hard questions may take some time and
 effort, several specific steps were suggested as medium or long term
 efforts to add protection to the Internet:
 o  Tightening the security of the core routing infrastructure.
 o  Cleaning up the Internet Routing Registry repository [IRR], and
    securing both the database and the access, so that it can be used
    for routing verifications.
 o  Take down botnets.
 o  Although we do not have a magic wand to wave all the unwanted
    traffic off the Internet, we should be able to develop effective
    measures to reduce the unwanted traffic to a tiny fraction of its
    current volume and keep it under control.
 o  Community education, to try to ensure people *use* updated host,
    router, and ingress filtering BCPs.

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8.3. Immediately Actionable Steps

 The IETF is recommended to take steps to carry out the following
 actions towards enhancing the network protection.
 o  Update the host requirements RFC.  The Internet host requirements
    ([RFC1122], [RFC1123]) were developed in 1989.  The Internet has
    gone through fundamental changes since then, including the
    pervasive security threats.  Thus, a new set of requirements is
    overdue.
 o  Update the router requirements.  The original router requirements
    [RFC1812] were developed in 1995.  As with the host requirements,
    it is also overdue for an update.
 o  Update ingress filtering (BCP 38 [RFC2827] and BCP 84 [RFC3704]).
 One immediate action that the IAB should carry out is to inform the
 community about the existence of the underground economy.
 The IRTF is recommended to take further steps toward understanding
 the Underground Economy and to initiate research on developing
 effective countermeasures.
 Overall, the workshop attendees wish to raise the community's
 awareness of the underground economy.  The community as a whole
 should undertake a systematic examination of the current situation
 and develop both near- and long-term plans.

9. Terminology

 This section gives an overview of some of the key concepts and
 terminology used in this document.  It is not intended to be
 complete, but is offered as a quick reference for the reader of the
 report.
 ACL
 Access Control List in the context of Internet networking refers to a
 set of IP addresses or routing prefixes (layer 3 or Internet layer
 information), possibly combined with transport protocol port numbers
 (layer 4 or transport layer information).  The layer 3 and/or layer 4
 information in the packets making up a flow entering or leaving a
 device in the Internet is matched against the entries in an ACL to
 determine whether the packets should, for example, be allowed or
 denied access to some resources.  The ACL effectively specifies a
 filter to be used on a flow of packets.

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 BGP route hijacking
 Attack in which an inappropriate route is injected into the global
 routing system with the intent of diverting traffic from its intended
 recipient either as a DoS attack (q.v.) where the traffic is just
 dropped or as part of some wider attack on the recipient.  Injecting
 spurious routes specifying addresses used for bogons can, for
 example, provide bogus assurance to email systems that spam is coming
 from legitimate addresses.
 Bogon
 A bogon is an IP packet that has a source address taken for a range
 of addresses that has not yet been allocated to legitimate users, or
 is a private [RFC1918] or reserved address [RFC3330].
 Bogon prefix
 A bogon prefix is a route that should never appear in the Internet
 routing table, e.g., from the private or unallocated address blocks.
 Bot
 A bot is common parlance on the Internet for a software program that
 is a software agent.  A Bot interacts with other network services
 intended for people as if it were a real person.  One typical use of
 bots is to gather information.  The term is derived from the word
 "robot," reflecting the autonomous character in the "virtual robot"-
 ness of the concept.
 The most common bots are those that covertly install themselves on
 people's computers for malicious purposes, and that have been
 described as remote attack tools.  Bots are sometimes called
 "zombies".
 Botnet
 Botnet is a jargon term for a collection of software robots, or bots,
 which run autonomously.  This can also refer to the network of
 computers using distributed computing software.  While the term
 "botnet" can be used to refer to any group of bots, such as IRC bots,
 the word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised
 machines running programs, usually referred to as worms, Trojan
 horses, or backdoors, under a common command and control
 infrastructure.
 Click fraud
 Click fraud occurs in pay per click (PPC) advertising when a person,
 automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a
 web browser clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an
 improper charge per click.  Pay per click advertising is when
 operators of web sites act as publishers and offer clickable links
 from advertisers in exchange for a charge per click.

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 Darknet
 A Darknet (also known as a Network Telescope, a Blackhole, or an
 Internet Sink) is a globally routed network that has no "real"
 machines attached and carries only a very small amount of specially
 crafted legitimate traffic.  It is therefore easily possible to
 separate out and analyze unwanted traffic that can arise from a wide
 variety of events including misconfiguration (e.g., a human being
 mis-typing an IP address), malicious scanning of address space by
 hackers looking for vulnerable targets, backscatter from random
 source denial-of-service attacks, and the automated spread of
 malicious software called Internet worms.
 Dirty affiliate program
 Affiliate programs are distributed marketing programs that recruit
 agents to promote a product or service.  Affiliates get financially
 compensated for each sale associated with their unique 'affiliate
 ID.'  Affiliates are normally instructed by the operator of the
 affiliate program to not break any laws while promoting the product
 or service.  Sanctions (typically loss of unpaid commissions or
 removal from the affiliate program) are normally applied if the
 affiliate spams or otherwise violates the affiliate program's
 policies.
 Dirty affiliate programs allow spamming, or if they do nominally
 prohibit spamming, they don't actually sanction violators.  Dirty
 affiliate programs often promote illegal or deceptive products
 (prescription drugs distributed without regard to normal dispensing
 requirements, body part enlargement products, etc.), employ anonymous
 or untraceable affiliates, offer payment via anonymous online
 financial channels, and may fail to follow normal tax withholding and
 reporting practices.
 DoS attack
 Denial-Of-Service attack, a type of attack on a network that is
 designed to bring the network to its knees by flooding it with
 useless traffic or otherwise blocking resources necessary to allow
 normal traffic flow.
 DDoS attack
 Distributed Denial of Service, an attack where multiple compromised
 systems are used to target a single system causing a Denial of
 Service (DoS) attack.
 Honey farm
 A honey farm is a set of honey pots working together.

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 Honey monkey
 A honey monkey is a honey pot in reverse; instead of sitting and
 waiting for miscreants, a honey monkey actively mimics the actions of
 a user surfing the Web.  The honey monkey runs on virtual machines in
 order to detect exploit sites.
 Honey pot
 A honey pot is a server attached to the Internet that acts as a
 decoy, attracting potential miscreants in order to study their
 activities and monitor how they are able to break into a system.
 Honeypots are designed to mimic systems that an intruder would like
 to break into but limit the intruder from having access to an entire
 network.
 IRC
 Internet Relay Chat is a form of instant communication over the
 Internet.  It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many)
 communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows
 one-to-one communication, originally standardized by RFC 1459
 [RFC1459] but much improved and extended since its original
 invention.  IRC clients rendezvous and exchange messages through IRC
 servers.  IRC servers are run by many organizations for both benign
 and nefarious purposes.
 Malware
 Malware is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer
 system, without the owner's informed consent.  There are
 disagreements about the etymology of the term itself, the primary
 uncertainty being whether it is a portmanteau word (of "malicious"
 and "software") or simply composed of the prefix "mal-" and the
 morpheme "ware".  Malware references the intent of the creator,
 rather than any particular features.  It includes computer viruses,
 worms, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, and other malicious and
 unwanted software.  In law, malware is sometimes known as a computer
 contaminant.
 Mix networks
 Mix networks create hard-to-trace communications by using a chain of
 proxy servers [MIX].  Each message is encrypted to each proxy; the
 resulting encryption is layered like a Russian doll with the message
 as the innermost layer.  Even if all but one of the proxies are
 compromised by a tracer, untraceability is still achieved.  More
 information can be found at
 <http://www.adastral.ucl.ac.uk/~helger/crypto/link/protocols/
 mix.php>.

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 Onion routing
 Onion routing is a technique for anonymous communication over a
 computer network, it is a technique that encodes routing information
 in a set of encrypted layers.  Onion routing is based on mix cascades
 (see mix networks (q.v.)).  More information can be found at
 <http://www.onion-router.net/>.
 Phishing
 Phishing is a form of criminal activity using social engineering
 techniques.  It is characterized by attempts to fraudulently acquire
 sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by
 masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an apparently
 official electronic communication.  Phishing is typically carried out
 using spoofed websites, email, or an instant message.  The term
 phishing derives from password harvesting and the use of increasingly
 sophisticated lures to "fish" for users' financial information and
 passwords.
 Root access
 Access to a system with full administrative privileges bypassing any
 security restrictions placed on normal users.  Derived from the name
 traditionally used for the 'superuser' on Unix systems.
 Script kiddy
 Derogatory term for an inexperienced hacker who mindlessly uses
 scripts and other programs developed by others with the intent of
 compromising computers or generating DoS attacks.
 Spam
 Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send
 unsolicited, undesired bulk messages.  The individual messages are
 refereed to as spam.  The term is frequently used to refer
 specifically to the electronic mail form of spam.
 Spoofing
 (IP) spoofing is a technique where the illegitimate source of IP
 packets is obfuscated by contriving to use IP address(es) that the
 receiver recognizes as a legitimate source.  Spoofing is often used
 to gain unauthorized access to computers or mislead filtering
 mechanisms, whereby the intruder sends packets into the network with
 an IP source address indicating that the message is coming from a
 legitimate host.  To engage in IP spoofing, a hacker must first use a
 variety of techniques to find an IP address of a valid host and then
 modify the packet headers so that it appears that the packets are
 coming from that host.

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 Spyware
 Any software that covertly gathers user information through the
 user's Internet connection without his or her knowledge, e.g., for
 spam purposes.
 UBE
 Unsolicited Bulk Email: an official term for spam.
 UCE
 Unsolicited Commercial Email: an official term for spam.
 Virus
 A program or piece of code that is loaded onto a computer without the
 owner's knowledge and runs without their consent.  A virus is self-
 replicating code that spreads by inserting copies of itself into
 other executable code or documents, which are then transferred to
 other machines.  Typically, the virus has a payload that causes some
 harm to the infected machine when the virus code is executed.
 Worm
 A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program.  It uses a
 network to send copies of itself to other systems and it may do so
 without any user intervention.  Unlike a virus, it does not need to
 attach itself to an existing program.  Worms always harm the network
 (if only by consuming bandwidth), whereas viruses always infect or
 corrupt files on a targeted computer.
 Zombie
 This is another name for a bot.

10. Security Considerations

 This document does not specify any protocol or "bits on the wire".

11. Acknowledgements

 The IAB would like to thank the University of Southern California
 Information Sciences Institute (ISI) who hosted the workshop and all
 those people at ISI and elsewhere who assisted with the organization
 and logistics of the workshop at ISI.
 The IAB would also like to thank the scribes listed in Appendix A who
 diligently recorded the proceedings during the workshop.
 A special thanks to all the participants in the workshop, who took
 the time, came to the workshop to participate in the discussions, and
 who put in the effort to make this workshop a success.  The IAB

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 38] RFC 4948 Unwanted Traffic August 2007

 especially appreciates the effort of those that prepared and made
 presentations at the workshop.

12. Informative References

 [IMS]      University of Michigan, "Internet Motion Sensor", 2006,
            <http://ims.eecs.umich.edu/>.
 [IRR]      Merit Network Inc, "Internet Routing Registry Routing
            Assets Database", 2006, <http://www.irr.net/>.
 [MIX]      Hill, R., Hwang, A., and D. Molnar, "Approaches to Mix
            Nets", MIT 6.857 Final Project, December 1999, <http://
            www.mit.edu/afs/athena/course/6/6.857/OldStuff/Fall99/
            papers/mixnet.ps.gz>.
 [RFC1122]  Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
            Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.
 [RFC1123]  Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts - Application
            and Support", STD 3, RFC 1123, October 1989.
 [RFC1459]  Oikarinen, J. and D. Reed, "Internet Relay Chat Protocol",
            RFC 1459, May 1993.
 [RFC1812]  Baker, F., "Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers",
            RFC 1812, June 1995.
 [RFC1918]  Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G., and
            E. Lear, "Address Allocation for Private Internets",
            BCP 5, RFC 1918, February 1996.
 [RFC2142]  Crocker, D., "MAILBOX NAMES FOR COMMON SERVICES, ROLES AND
            FUNCTIONS", RFC 2142, May 1997.
 [RFC2827]  Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
            Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
            Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, May 2000.
 [RFC3330]  IANA, "Special-Use IPv4 Addresses", RFC 3330,
            September 2002.
 [RFC3704]  Baker, F. and P. Savola, "Ingress Filtering for Multihomed
            Networks", BCP 84, RFC 3704, March 2004.
 [SHRED]    Krishnamurthy, B. and E. Blackmond, "SHRED: Spam
            Harassment Reduction via Economic Disincentives", 2003,
            <http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers/shred-ext.ps>.

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Appendix A. Participants in the Workshop

 Bernard Aboba (IAB)
 Loa Andersson (IAB)
 Ganesha Bhaskara (scribe)
 Bryan Burns
 Leslie Daigle (IAB chair)
 Sean Donelan
 Rich Draves (IAB Executive Director)
 Aaron Falk (IAB, IRTF chair)
 Robert Geigle
 Minas Gjoka (scribe)
 Barry Greene
 Sam Hartman (IESG, Security Area Director)
 Bob Hinden (IAB)
 Russ Housely (IESG, Security Area Director)
 Craig Huegen
 Cullen Jennings
 Rodney Joffe
 Mark Kosters
 Bala Krishnamurthy
 Gregory Lebovitz
 Ryan McDowell
 Danny McPherson
 Dave Merrill
 David Meyer (IAB)
 Alan Mitchell
 John Morris
 Eric Osterweil (scribe)
 Eric Rescorla (IAB)
 Pete Resnick (IAB)
 Stefan Savage
 Joe St Sauver
 Michael Sirivianos (scribe)
 Rob Thomas
 Helen Wang
 Lixia Zhang (IAB)

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Appendix B. Workshop Agenda

 Session 1:
 How bad is the problem? What are the most important symptoms?
 Session 2:
 What are the sources of the problem?
 Lunch session (session 3):
 Solutions in regulatory and societal space
 Session 4:
 The underground economy
 Session 5:
 Current countermeasures, what works, what doesn't
 Session 6:
 If all our wishes could be granted, what would they be?
 Session 7:
 What's in the pipeline, or should be in the pipeline
 Session 8:
 What is being actively researched on?
 Session 9:
 What are the engineering (immediate and longer term) and
 research issues that might be pursued within the IETF/IAB/IRTF?

Appendix C. Slides

 Links to a subset of the presentations given by the participants at
 the workshop can be found via the IAB Workshops page on the IAB web
 site at <http://utgard.ietf.org/iab/about/workshops/unwantedtraffic/
 index.html>.  As mentioned in Section 1, this is not a complete set
 of the presentations because certain of the presentations were of a
 sensitive nature which it would be inappropriate to make public at
 this time.

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Authors' Addresses

 Loa Andersson
 Acreo AB
 EMail: loa@pi.se
 Elwyn Davies
 Folly Consulting
 EMail: elwynd@dial.pipex.com
 Lixia Zhang
 UCLA
 EMail: lixia@cs.ucla.edu

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Full Copyright Statement

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 rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement
 this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF at
 ietf-ipr@ietf.org.

Acknowledgement

 Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
 Internet Society.

Andersson, et al. Informational [Page 43]

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