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Date:      05 Jul 1999 14:57:43 +0200
From:      Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@flood.ping.uio.no>
To:        "N.N.M" <madrapour@hotmail.com>
Cc:        jcarlos@bahianet.com.br, freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: IDENTD
Message-ID:  <xzpk8sfuud4.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
In-Reply-To: "N.N.M"'s message of "Mon, 05 Jul 1999 04:30:28 PDT"
References:  <19990705113029.28794.qmail@hotmail.com>

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"N.N.M" <madrapour@hotmail.com> writes:
> 2) Can it be consequnced: it is basically better to block the all 
> conncetions we want, by using "reject" instead of "deny"? Based on what you 
> said (and I read about), using "reject" decreases the further re-attemting 
> conncetions, so it will decrease the unusable and unwanted traffic as well. 
> Is it right?

Depends how paranoid you are, and how exposed you are.

If you block, clients will sit around waiting for an answer until they
time out (normally after 75 seconds, I think). If you reject, they'll
get an immediate negative reply and give up at once. So, from the
client's POV, reject is better.

On the other hand, if you get flooded (syn flood, port scan,
whatever), a reject rule will generate large amounts of ICMP traffic
which not only eats local resources but may bring down your upstream
routers if the attacker spoofs his source address (you're sending out
ICMP packets to zillions of invalid addresses, and the router blows up
trying to find out where to send them).

You can avoid these problems to a certain degree by using a traffic
shaper (altq, dummynet) to impose a rate limit on outgoing SYN+ACK
(easier on the router) and SYN cookies to avoid keeping a list of
received SYNs (easier on yourself).

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@flood.ping.uio.no


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