Overview
Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) protects a network against source address spoofing attacks, such as DoS and DDoS attacks.
Attackers send packets with a forged source address to access a system that uses IP-based authentication, in the name of authorized users or even the administrator. Even if the attackers or other hosts cannot receive any response packets, the attacks are still disruptive to the attacked target.
Figure 128: Source address spoofing attack
As shown in Figure 128, an attacker on Router A sends the server (Router B) requests with a forged source IP address 2.2.2.1 at a high rate, and Router B sends response packets to IP address 2.2.2.1 (Router C). Consequently, both Router B and Router C are attacked. If the administrator disconnects Router C by mistake, the network service is interrupted.
Attackers can also send packets with different forged source addresses or attack multiple servers simultaneously to block connections or even break down the network.
uRPF can prevent these source address spoofing attacks. It checks whether an interface that receives a packet is the output interface of the FIB entry that matches the source address of the packet. If not, uRPF considers it a spoofing attack and discards the packet.