Political Theory

Re: DDOS Attacks

Caley McKibbin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:42:49 GMT

Mostly, they are for "pre-teens" whose parents don't trust them with a real cell phone.

Pay by minute/megabtyte is for people who use 1000th the service of The ISP Employee uploading terabytes of warez from the secret server at the office and don't want to pay a socialized rate set according to the cost of running that. The people that should be paying are the idiots that downloaded freeporn.exe, whose computers are sending attack packets, and uploading with Limewire 24/7. The present internet works about the same as the health care system. It is indeed a rip-off paying for what you get.

The main reason that few people buy pay per use telecom services, aside from general stupidity... well, you find me such a service and I'll buy it. Excellence brought to you by the telecom monopoly.

Heh isn't this exactly what they're trying to do? But the nay-sayers are crying wolf?

I don't know the exact technical details of how they propose to operate. The main point for me is that charges must be for upstream, not downstream, according to the load placed on the routers.

Re: DDOS Attacks

filc — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:01:18 GMT

liberty student:
filc, my man love for you increases now that I know you're a cloud master.

It's both an exciting, and furiously frustrating thing to be into. A year ago I had some theory's as to how this whole cloud thing, coupled with virtualization, was going to pan out. Now I question my own speculation. Thats what makes it fun though I guess. :)

Over a year ago we were a primarily eucalyptus joint, now we have migrated most our stuff to vmware. Though we still have resources in both. The market moves fast, and so will we!

Student:
I only meant that there wasn't some new tool or technology that saved amazon. 5 years ago excess bandwidth would have deflected the ddos attack just as easily as it did last month.

But as stated before, especially in the case of amazon, it was not likely a bandwidth intense DDOS attack. Those are far more difficult to concert, and less efficient, though more damaging as they bring down networks laterally.

The most efficient way to DDOS is just to send a specific web app various requests. Seeing if the node has the computational ability to keep up with the requests. In the case with amazon, their novelty was being the first to scale server performance on-demand.

Any report that comes out pretending to know exactly what kind of DDOS attack was performed on Amazon is sheer speculation. Unless it was published by a hactivist itself, Amazon is not going to release such a report, regarding the vulnerabilities of their internal network, and it's not likely to be the hactivists either. I've read those reports before and I usually just gloss over them. Most of those guys writing that stuff have on idea.

On a side note, this is why companies like Mojang for example, the creators of minecraft, move their hosting to Amazon. Specifically because their existing provider could not handle DDOS attacks. Amazon just gobbles it up.

LS:
Problems are solved in the market, not in economic papers.

This

Re: DDOS Attacks

filc — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:39:29 GMT

Caley McKibbin:
DoS attacks work so well because ISPs use a stupid charge system. Instead of charging senders per MB they charge flat rates for fixed bandwidth. Fix that and you fix several problems with the internet.

Heh isn't this exactly what they're trying to do? But the nay-sayers are crying wolf?

Re: DDOS Attacks

Autolykos — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:11:47 GMT

Charles Anthony:
Well, I am quite content waving my hands and saying The Market will display a way. I guess I do not understand your curiosity. I do not understand a lot of the pop music that youngsters enjoy these days either.

You can call it "intellectual speculation" if you want. I like to imagine the possibilities. :P

Re: DDOS Attacks

Charles Anthony — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:02:57 GMT

Well, I am quite content waving my hands and saying The Market will display a way. I guess I do not understand your curiosity. I do not understand a lot of the pop music that youngsters enjoy these days either.

When I was avidly listening to pop music, the internet did not even exist. If you asked about what the market will find twenty years ago, your search would be endless.

Re: DDOS Attacks

Autolykos — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:54:52 GMT

Charles Anthony:
The question of the OP presupposes a couple of things:

1) that the internet would even exist in a free-market society

2) even if a free-market society did exhibit an internet, such internet would be technologically the same or very similar to the current internet which is vulnerable to DDOS attacks.

Quite right. I see no reason to believe that one or more internets couldn't exist in a free-market society with a comparable level of technological development. The core idea behind the/an internet is multiple computers that are able to communicate with one another in some fashion. One very common type of communication is request-response. When one computer sends a request to another computer, which subsequently sends back a response, we can say that the first computer is the client and the second computer is the server. Hopefully this illustrates how client-server relationships (if not also client-server architectures) readily arise from the idea of computer communication and networking.

My intent with the OP was to try to find out which "real-world" situation corresponds most accurately to (D)DoS attacks on the internet. It wasn't about speculating whether the internet as we know it would even exist in any free-market society. The fault is mine for not being clearer about this in the OP. Suffice it to say, I'm not content to simply wave my hands and say that the market will find a way. I'm curious about which ways it seems likely to find.

Re: DDOS Attacks

Statism is Crime — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:50:22 GMT

There is nothing "stupid" about the way ISPs charge their customers at present. Most people prefer a predictable Internet bill, so charging people a flat rate for unlimited service makes sense to customers. Maybe there are some people who would prefer to be billed based on how much they use, but that is a very small market, as even people who would save money from that model would probably prefer the current model. You can't manage a budget if you aren't able to predict your costs. I'm sure the RIAA would love to see flat rate unlimited Internet service outlawed, as that would probably stop 99% of the online violations of imaginary "property" legislation, but very few people would voluntarily choose an unpredictable Internet bill.

Web hosts exist that sell hosting where you only pay for what you use. Most people do not use those web hosts and prefer to pay more money to a host for unlimited (or some ridiculous amount of) resources. Such a web hosting service is a great deal if nobody visits your web site, but it is a ripoff if your site becomes popular or has alot of content.

Even cell phone companies sell data plans that sell a certain amount of Internet service for a fixed rate. They do the same thing with cell phone minutes and with text messaging. You can buy a cell phone where you only pay for what you use in any store, but very few people buy them. Mostly, they are for "pre-teens" whose parents don't trust them with a real cell phone.

A DDOS attack is an obvious violation of rights. The difficulty is with identifying those responsible for the attack (specifically the ringleaders). The criminal who attacked Wikileaks would probably be much easier to catch than that Anonymous organization. I think a statist society could probably handle Anonymous better, as a statist society could more easily shut down that 4chan web site. If you indiscriminately target "participants" in the attack, you run the risk of targeting legitimate users who happened to be trying to visit that site at the time of the attack.

Re: DDOS Attacks

Caley McKibbin — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:18:53 GMT

DoS attacks work so well because ISPs use a stupid charge system. Instead of charging senders per MB they charge flat rates for fixed bandwidth. Fix that and you fix several problems with the internet.

Re: DDOS Attacks

liberty student — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:10:25 GMT

Student:
as a side note, this is why i think cyber security economics is probably going to be a field on the rise in comming years. taking my que from ross anderson (the leading scholar in the field), i figure most cyber security problems are not inherently technological problems. instead they are behaviorlal/economic problems that require behavioral/economic solutions. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/econ_czech.pdf

Lots of rent seeking to be found there which would validate your notion that it is a behavioral problem. All rent seeking is.

Problems are solved in the market, not in economic papers.

Re: DDOS Attacks

Student — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:43:34 GMT

flic,

I only meant that there wasn't some new tool or technology that saved amazon. 5 years ago excess bandwidth would have deflected the ddos attack just as easily as it did last month.

and you are making it sound like the problem is essentially already solved. i think paypal would tell you otherwise, since their website was flooded once the hactivists decided amazon was too big and decided to go after them (ditto for visa and mastercard).

now, i'm not saying that this probltem could never be solved by better technology. i'm just saying i have my doubts.

personally i think this report from idefense sums up my feelings best:

Ultimately, many defenses, once employed, can later be circumvented by an attaker. It has always been and remains easier for an attacker to adapt their attack vectors or simply increase the number attacking bots than it is for the defenders to mitigate the attack, to increase resources, or to recover.
http://complianceandprivacy.com/WhitePapers/iDefense_DDoS_20060428.pdf

as a side note, this is why i think cyber security economics is probably going to be a field on the rise in comming years. taking my que from ross anderson (the leading scholar in the field), i figure most cyber security problems are not inherently technological problems. instead they are behaviorlal/economic problems that require behavioral/economic solutions. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/econ_czech.pdf

Re: DDOS Attacks

liberty student — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:35:34 GMT

filc, my man love for you increases now that I know you're a cloud master.

Re: DDOS Attacks

filc — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:15:24 GMT

Student:
so it wasn't an advancement in technology that saved amazon, it was just the over-provision of resources. if the attack was bigger, it would have succeded.

Thats like saying HPC is just an over-provision of resources. Or an Intel I-7 is an over-abundance of transistors. New technology is nothing more then an outgrowth of previous. Technology simply increases in abundance and performance and in the process becoming cheaper. Besides, anyone who hosts web applications knows that bandwidth is only half the problem, and technically should not be a problem. Reports that show that are misleading. A good ISP can throttle such traffic fairly easily.(My own routers are configured in such a way). If we were DDOS'd which we have been in the past, it's because our cloud nodes may not be able to handle it (yet), not because our routers couldn't punch the data through.

The passing of IP datagram's is a trivial exercise when in comparison to actual servers. Thats why historically routing processors have never needed to be that beefy. However recently that is changing.

Amazon:
Of course, none of this should be of *any* comfort to probably 90% of all other internet businesses, who don't have and don't need the resources to handle the traffic that amazon does.

And why should they? Why don't they host with Amazon? ANd/Or why don't service providers begin to offer similar services?

Answer: THey do, and we are. Amazon was just one of the first ones around to have the horsepower, and via cloud computing found a constructive way to use it.

Re: DDOS Attacks

Student — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:49:37 GMT

filc,

the reason amazon was able to repel the ddos attack last year was because they had access to the bandwith to handle it. and they had the bandwidth to handle it because they have to be prepared for huge surges in visitation. if they didn't, then their website would have crashed 2 weeks ago when millions of people probably flooded the site for last minute gifts.

so it wasn't an advancement in technology that saved amazon, it was just the over-provision of resources. if the attack was bigger, it would have succeded.

that shouldn't be surprising since these attacks were probably not very large if they were anything like the attacks on wikileaks.

But Arbor Networks, which analyzes malicious network traffic crossing the internet’s backbones, reports that the DDoS generated between 2 and 4 Gbps of disruptive traffic, slightly above the average for all DDoS attacks, but well below the peak 60 to 100 Gbps consumed by truly massive attacks against other websites over the last year

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/wikileaks-attack/

Of course, none of this should be of *any* comfort to probably 90% of all other internet businesses, who don't have and don't need the resources to handle the traffic that amazon does.

Re: DDOS Attacks

filc — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:20:32 GMT

LS:
I think I am the only person here who has been personally DDOS'd, so I have some experience with the matter.

I build and maintain routed and routing infrastructures for a living. More recently cloud development.

THe best description here is

Daniel Muffinburg:
Is it a proper analogy to say that a DDoS attack is like when a whole bunch of people try to enter through the door to your shop and clog up the entrance?

On a side note it's really a mute point as technology is already starting to handle these problems(No intervention needed). Does anyone know what happened to amazon when the Hactivists placed their attention to them?

Re: DDOS Attacks

Charles Anthony — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:51:37 GMT

The question of the OP presupposes a couple of things:

1) that the internet would even exist in a free-market society

2) even if a free-market society did exhibit an internet, such internet would be technologically the same or very similar to the current internet which is vulnerable to DDOS attacks.

Keep in mind, in our current state of affairs, the internet infrastructue we are all currently using to communicate depends upon the current state monopoly on the legal system -- the enforcement of contracts which may not exist in a free-market.

To be blunt: we can not assume that our level of technological dependence is sustainable without the state. Our internet infrastructure depends highling on the state. Thus, we may actually regress without government thus as public service employee pension plans would regress without government.

Just like printing money makes our current state-dependent money markets unstable, it could be DDOS attacks which cause our state-dependent internet to be too unstable.

How SHOULD DDOS attacks be handled?

How cares? Leave them alone. Anybody who cares to resolve a perceived dispute will figure it out.