A number of common types of DoS attacks take advantage of forged or rapidly changing source IP addresses, allowing attackers to thwart efforts by ISPs to locate or filter these attacks. Unicast RPF was originally created to help mitigate such attacks by providing an automated, scalable mechanism to implement the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Best Common Practices 38/Request for Comments 2827 (BCP 38/RFC 2827) anti-spoofing filtering on the customer-to-ISP network edge. By taking advantage of the information stored in the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) that is created by the CEF switching process, Unicast RPF can determine whether IP packets are spoofed or malformed by matching the IP source address and ingress interface against the FIB entry that reaches “back” to this source (a so-called “reverse lookup”). Packets that are received from one of the best reverse path routes back out of the same interface are forwarded as normal. If there is no reverse path route on the same interface from which the packet was received, it might mean that the source address was modified, and the packet is dropped (by default).

This original implementation of Unicast RPF, known as “strict mode,” required a match between the ingress interface and the reverse path FIB entry. With Unicast RPF, all equal-cost “best” return paths are considered valid, meaning that it works for cases in which multiple return paths exist, provided that each path is equal in routing cost to the others (number of hops, weights, and so on), and as long as the route is in the FIB. Unicast RPF also functions when Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) variants are being used and unequal candidate paths back to the source IP address exist. The strict mode works well for customer-to-ISP network edge configurations that have symmetrical flows (including some multihomed configurations in which symmetrical flows can be enforced).

However, some customer-to-ISP network edges and nearly all ISP-to-ISP network edges use multihomed configurations in which routing asymmetry is typical. When traffic flows are asymmetrical, that is, those in which traffic from Network A to Network B would normally take a different path from traffic flowing from Network B to Network A, the Unicast RPF check will always fail the strict mode test. Because this type of asymmetric routing is common among ISPs and in the Internet core, the original implementation of Unicast RPF was not available for use by ISPs on their core routers and ISP-to-ISP links.

Over time and with an increase in DDoS attacks on the Internet, the functionality of Unicast RPF was reviewed as a tool that ISPs can use on the ISP-to-ISP network edge (an ISP router “peered” with another ISP router) to enable dynamic BGP, triggered black-hole filtering. To provide this functionality, however, the mechanisms used with Unicast RPF had to be modified to permit its deployment on the ISP-to-ISP network edge so that asymmetrical routing is not an issue.

To provide ISPs with a DDoS resistance tool on the ISP-to-ISP edge of a network, Unicast RPF was modified from its original strict mode implementation to check the source addresses of each ingress packet without regard for the specific interface on which it was received. This modification is known as “loose mode.” Loose mode allows Unicast RPF to automatically detect and drop packets such as the following:

• IETF RFC 1918 source addresses

• Other Documenting Special Use Addresses (DUSA) that should not appear in the source

• Unallocated addresses that have not been allocated by the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)

• Source addresses that are routed to a null interface on the router

Loose mode removes the match requirement on the specific ingress interface, allowing Unicast RPF to loose-check packets. This packet checking allows the “peering” router of an ISP having multiple links to multiple ISPs to check the source IP address of ingress packets to determine whether they exist in the FIB. If they exist, the packets are forwarded. If they do not exist in the FIB, the packets fail and are dropped. This checking increases resistance against DoS and DDoS attacks that use spoofed source addresses and unallocated IP addresses.