Saturday, July 28, 2012
- For protecting routers, Layer 3 forwarding (IP routing), and the layer 3 control plane(routing protocols), additionally RFCs 2827 & 3704 outline other types of protections
- RFC 2827 addresses issues with
- the use of the IP source & destination fields in the IP header to form some kind of attack
- RFC 3704 details some issues related to how the tools of 2827 may be best deployed over the internet.
KEY LAYER 3 SECURITY recommendations from SAFE blueprint
- Using Secure Shell, enable secure telnet access to a router user interface.
- Enable SNMP security, particularly adding SNMPv3 support
- Turn off all unnecessary servieces on the router platform
- Turn on logging to provide an audit trail
- Enable routing protocol authentication
- Enable the CEF forwarding path to avoid using flow-based paths like fast switching
Monday, July 9, 2012
General Layer 2 Security Recommendatinos
- Put unused switch ports in an unused VLAN & not use the VLAN 1.
- Native VLANs are not use on trunks.
- Reason is, an attacker on an access port might be able to hop from its access port VLAN to a trunk's native VLAN by sending frames that begin with multiple 802.1Q header.
- Cisco suggest using a different native VLAN for each trunk.
- Private VLANs restrict hosts on some ports from sending frames directly to each other.
- Private VLANs are created with some number of selected ports in the primary VLAN, with other isolated & community ports in one or more secondary VLANs.
- Isolated ports can send frames only to selected ports, and community ports can send frames to selected ports & other community ports in the same 2ry VLAN.
- Private VLANs could be applied generally for better security by making user ports isolated,
- They only allowing them access to ports like routers, servers or other network services.
- However, DHCP snooping, DAI & IP source gaurd are typically better choices
- Attackers uses the default gateway to overcome security provided by PVlans,
- to solve this router simply need inbound ACL, that denies traffic whose source & destination ip address are in the same local connected subnet.
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Storm Control
- Catalyst switches need rate-limiting traffic at layer-2
- To do this uses the storm-control commands.
- Storm control configured to set min & max port traffic (unicast, multicast & broadcast).
- Each rate limit can be configured on a per-port basis.
- Storm control can be configured on each type of traffic based on
- Either packet rate or a percentage of the interface bandwidth.
- We can also specify rising & falling thresholds for each traffic type.
- If we don't specify falling threshold or if the falling threshold is the same as the rising threshold
- the switch port forward all traffic up to the configured limit
- and will not wait for the specified falling threshold before forwarding it again.
- When any of the configured threshold is passed, the switch can take 3 additional actions (also on port basis)
- 1st & default is the switch can rate-limit by discarding excess traffic according to the configured commands & take no further action.
- The other 2 actions include performing the rate-limiting function & either shutting down the port or sending an SNMP trap.
- Commands
- interface f0/0
- storm-control broadcast level pps 100 50
- limit broadcast traffic to 100packets per seconds
- when traffic drops back to 50 pack/sec, begin forwarding traffic again.
- storm-control multicast level 0.50 0.40
- limit multicast traffic to 0.5 percent of the 100Mbps interface rate
- when traffic drops back to 400kbps, begin forwarding again
- storm-control action trap
- any of above conditions occure & results in rate-limiting, send an SNMP trap.
- show storm-control f0/0 {unicast | multicast \ broadcast }
- Limitation:
- it supports only physical ports
- storm control configure on etherchannel interface, but it has no effect.
802.1X Configuration
- 802.1X switch configuration resembles the AAA configuration.
- The Switch configuration treats 802.1X user authentication as another option for AAA authentication.
- Configuration Steps:
- As with other AAA authentication methods, enable AAA with global command
- aaa new-model
- As with other configurations using RADIUS servers, define the RADIUS servers ip address & encryption keys using command
- radius-server host
- radius-server key
- Similar to login authentication configuration, define the 802.1X authentication method (RADIUS only) using global commands
- aaa authentcation dot1x default
- for multiple groups aaa authentication dot1x group name
- Enable 802.1X globally using global command
- dot1x system auth-control
- Set each interface to use one of three operational settings using the command
- dot1x port-control { auto | force-authorized | force-unauthorized }
- using 802.1x (auto)
- not using 802.1x, but the interface is automatically authorized
- force-authorized default
- not using 802.1x, but the interface is automatically unauthorized
- force-unauthorized
802.1X Roles:
- Supplicant:
- the 802.1x driver supplies a username/password prompt to the user and sends/recives the EAPoL messages.
- Authentication:
- Translate between EAPoL & RADIUS messages in bothe directions and enables/disables ports based on the success/failure of authentication
- Authentication Server:
- Stores usernames/passwords and verifies that the correct values were submitted before authenticating the user
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