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Comment by cambyrne | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that today, UDP is a rate limited sewer of attack traffic from Brazilian home routers and so on. Your legit traffic is guilty by association. Devs need to know udp is collateral damage in the ddos war

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> Devs need to know udp is collateral damage in the ddos war

Is it? Where's the citation to support the claim that UDP is widely rate-limited? Even if some network operators are daft enough to be indiscriminately rate-limiting all of UDP and not just the ports that are abused (DNS, SNMP, NTP, etc.), how is it productive to encourage more network operators to do that, as this draft does? (Section 4, "Recommendations for Network Operators" point 3.)

I would actually put money on most of those UDP rate limits being in place because of uTP Bittorrent traffic. It's dumb and it needs to stop. Nothing between two networks on the Internet should be inspecting the transport layer.

And since when has 'guilty by association' been a good reason to condemn anything?

It's not a matter of guilt. It is a practical reality of the ddos abuse on the net. It is massive and breaks network. It is all we can do to keep the net up at times. Serious.

Is the net up if we can't fully use it? UDP is an important part of the net. If we can't use it, then the net is not fully operational.

There are other ways to combat abuse than to filter out half the popular application protocols on the net. Eg start depeering ISPs who aren't swift in limiting/taking down their DoS spewing compromised customers.

How are you rate limiting UDP traffic? If it's after the traffic is on your network isn't that too late to be rate limiting?

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