Build A Darknet To Capture Naughty Traffic
DM_NeoFLeX writes "Have some routable Address Space lying around? You might want to build a DarkNet. The folks over at Team Cymru have outlined instructions for creating one with FreeBSD and as little as /32 routable space. From the article: 'A Darknet is a portion of routed, allocated IP space in which no active services or servers reside. These are 'dark' because there is, seemingly, nothing within these networks. Any packet that enters a Darknet is by its presence Aberrant.' Darknets can provide useful information for tracking the flow of naughty network traffic."
Ok, it's a really good idea, but catching the naughty traffic isnt the hard part, what does it do witht he naughty traffic it gets, just make a pretty graph?
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
An interesting use of a darknet would be to shield a real server from unwanted attacks. Have the darknet relate any internet IPs that contact the darknet to your real server to ignore.
As an example. Setup a darknet on the following IPs:
DARK_A : 204.210.34.1
DARK_B : 204.210.34.3
Setup the real server mathematically between the two darknet IP addresses:
REAL : 204.210.34.2
Now have DARK_A & DARK_B contact REAL whenever DARK_A or DARK_B receive any packets. REAL can be setup to, on the fly, filter out any packets received from the same source as the DARK servers reported.
In a sense you're creating a realtime blacklist. You can set the list on a timed delay to expire. Or even filter out specific packet signatures instead of entire suspect IP addresses.
just a thought...
Joseph Elwell