[Babel-users] Verify ETX route metric

[Jehan Tremback]

We are trying to mitigate one of the issues described in RFC6126:

> As defined in this document, Babel is a completely insecure protocol. Any
attacker can attract data traffic by advertising routes with a low metric.

We're concerned about this mostly because a node could advertise a low
metric, attract traffic, and then charge for it. One avenue we've thought
about is to run the link cost calculation end to end across the entire
route to a given destination. This could give a "second opinion" of what
the metric to that destination should be. This could be used as a way to
detect nodes that are cheating.

For example:

if

(A)--2--(B)--3--(C)--1--(D) = 5

then

(A)----------5----------(D) = 5

A performs the link cost calculation between herself and D to find out if B
or C are cheating. Have you thought about this at all? What's your opinion?

-Jehan

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 11:16 PM, Juliusz Chroboczek <
jch at pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr> wrote:

> > This is more a theoretical than practical question right now, but is it
> > possible for a node to verify the ETX metrics of its neighbors? That is,
> > compute the ETX between myself and a given destination, and use it to
> confirm
> > that the additive ETX metric to that destination computed by the
> neighbor is
> > correct.
>
> Could you please explain?  I'm not sure I'm following you.
>
> -- Juliusz
>
>
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