An interesting thread came up on Asterisk-Users the other day...
Someone had problems with some miscreant attempting (and apparently succeeding) to bruteforce a SIP account on his Asterisk system.
That's a problem. Asterisk currently has no means to protect against any type of SIP flooding/bruteforce/DoS (other than running out of resources/crashing). That's ok because some people (like myself) would argue that these types of attacks are best handled via other means...
Like the kernel, or preferably the kernel of a completely seperate box.
It got me to thinking - maybe I could whip up a script using some of the cool stuff in iptables/netfilter to mitigate these SIP DoS attacks in the kernel. I don't have a ton of time to elaborate on the script but for now here it is:
http://admin.star2star.com/sipdos
It's not great. It's not very SIP-specific. Who knows how accurate/effective/resource intensive it is. It hasn't been tested (much). For all I know, it will just make things worse. However, I think it is a step in the right direction and hopefully one of many tools that can be used to protect Asterisk and other SIP/VoIP systems.
By the way, I call it "SIP DoS Mitigation" because with any large enough DDoS attack, you are toast. ..
Speaking of other tools... We're all going to celebrate America's birthday this Friday by getting together on a conference call/IRC to talk over some of these issues with the VoIP User's Conference. Hear you there?
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