BLACKHOLE Community
RFC 7999
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) T. King
Request for Comments: 7999 C. Dietzel
Category: Informational DE-CIX
ISSN: 2070-1721 J. Snijders
NTT
G. Doering
SpaceNet AG
G. Hankins
Nokia
October 2016
BLACKHOLE Community
Abstract
This document describes the use of a well-known Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) community for destination-based blackholing in IP
networks. This well-known advisory transitive BGP community named
"BLACKHOLE" allows an origin Autonomous System (AS) to specify that a
neighboring network should discard any traffic destined towards the
tagged IP prefix.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7999.
King, et al. Informational [Page 1]
RFC 7999 BLACKHOLE Community October 2016
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................3
1.1. Requirements Language ......................................3
2. BLACKHOLE Community .............................................4
3. Operational Recommendations .....................................4
3.1. IP Prefix Announcements with BLACKHOLE Community Attached ..4
3.2. Local Scope of Blackholes ..................................4
3.3. Accepting Blackholed IP Prefixes ...........................5
4. Vendor Implementation Recommendations ...........................6
5. IANA Considerations .............................................6
6. Security Considerations .........................................6
7. References ......................................................7
7.1. Normative References .......................................7
7.2. Informative References .....................................7
Acknowledgements ...................................................8
Authors' Addresses .................................................9
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RFC 7999 BLACKHOLE Community October 2016
1. Introduction
Network infrastructures have been increasingly hampered by DDoS
attacks. In order to dampen the effects of these DDoS attacks, IP
networks have offered blackholing with BGP [RFC4271] using various
mechanisms such as those described in [RFC3882] and [RFC5635].
DDoS attacks targeting a certain IP address may cause congestion of
links used to connect to adjacent networks. In order to limit the
impact of such a scenario on legitimate traffic, networks adopted a
mechanism called "BGP blackholing". A network that wants to trigger
blackholing needs to understand the triggering mechanism adopted by
its neighboring networks. Different networks provide different
mechanisms to trigger blackholing, including but not limited to pre-
defined blackhole next-hop IP addresses, specific BGP communities, or
out-of-band BGP sessions with a special BGP speaker.
Having several different mechanisms to trigger blackholing in
different networks makes it an unnecessarily complex, error-prone,
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