Cisco IOS Firewall protocol Support

• An IOS firewall can inspect a long list of protocols when CBAC was used.
• Common protocols that CBAC can inspects are:
• Any generic TCP session, regardless of application layer protocol
• All UDP "sessions"
• FTP
• SMTP
• TFTP
• H.323 (NetMeeting, ProShare, and so on)
• Java
• CU-SeeMe
• UNIX R commands (rlogin, rexec, rsh, and so on)
• RealAudo
• Sun RPC
• SQL*Net
• StreamWorks
• VDOLive

TCP vs UDP with CBAC

• CBAC works on TCP & UDP traffic 
• It supports FTP that require multiple, simultaneous sessions or connections.
• CBA used to protect internal network from external threats by configuring it to inspect inbound traffic from the outside world for those protocols.
• TCP has clear-cut connections
• so CBAC can handle it rather easily.
• CBAC works at a deeper level than simply protocols & port numbers.
• for example, with FTP traffic, CBAC recognises and inspects the specific FTP control channel commands to decide when to open and close the temporary firewall openings.
• UDP traffic is connection less when compare to TCP, so it is more difficult to handle. 
•  CBAC manages UDP by approximating based on factors such as
• whether the source and destination addresses & ports of UDP frames are the same as those that came recently
• & their relative timing.
• CBAC uses the global idle timeout to determine whether a segment arrived "close enough" in time (then it will be considered as part of the same flow.
• Other timeouts are protocol-specific timeouts for TCP & UDP traffic.
• 
  
• 
  

Classic Cisco IOS Firewall

• ACL filtering may be enough to control & secure a router interface
• When attackers have become more sophisticated, Cisco has developed better tools to deal with threats.
• The challenge, is always, is to make security features relatively transparent to network users while thwarting attackers. 

                               

3) TCP SYN Flood, the Established Bit, and TCP Intercept

• A TCP SYN flood is an attack directed at servers
• By initiating the large no.of TCP connections
• but not the completing the connections.
• The attacker initiates many TCP connections, each with only the TCP SYN flag set.
• the server sends reply with tcy syn & ACK flag set
• but attacker simply does not reply( with the 3rd message in 3-way TCP connection setup flow
• Then there is servers consumes memory & resources while waiting on its timeouts.
• This can cause the unbalance the load of  actual working connections.
• solution:
• Statefull firewalls can prevent TCP SYN attacks.
• Bothe the Cisco ASA Firewall & Cisco IOS Firewall features set can be used to do this.
• The impact of TCP SYN attacks can be reduced or eliminated by using a few other tools in cisco ios.
• To prevent SYN attacks is to simply filter packets whose TCP header shows only the SYN flag set.
• In other words, filter all packets that are the first packet in a new TCP connections.
• In many cases router should not allow TCP connections to be established by a client on one side to a server on the other.
• In this cases, filtering the initial TCP segment prevents the SYN attack.
• Cisco IOS ACLs cannot directly match the TCP SYN flag. 
• However, an ACE can use the established keyword, which matches TCP segment except the very 1st TCP segment in a new connection.
• The ACL works well when host outside of a network are not allowed to make TCP connections into the network.
• There is situation when some inbound TCP connections allowed,
• at that time ACL can not be used
• TCP intercept  is used
• It provides an alternative that allows TCP connections into the network, but monitors those TCP connections for TCP SYN attacks.
• TCP intercepts operates in one of 2 different modes
• In Watch Mode,
• It keeps state of information about TCP connections that match a defined ACL. 
• If a TCP connection does not complete the 3-way, with in a particular time period, TCP intercept sends a TCP reset to the server, cleaning up the connection.
• Also counts no.of new connections attempted over time, 
• if a large number of new connections occurs in 1 second (default is 1100 connections per sec), the router temporarily filters new TCP requests to prevent a perceived SYN attack.
• In Intercept Mode,
• The router replies to TCP connections requests instead of forwarding them to the actual server.
• Then, if 3-way hand shake completes, the router creates a TCP connection between itself and the server.
• 
  

2) Inappropriate IP addresses

• By using Inappropriate IP addresses, some of
• the attackers remain hidden & with help of other hosts to create a distributed denial-of-service(DDoS) attack.
• Best Layer-3 security practice is use of ACL to filter packets containing ip address which are not appropriate.
• Router should also filter packets that are bogus or inappropriate.
• ex, a packet should never have a broadcast or multicast source ip address in normal use.
• Router should never receive a packet from an ISP with that Packet's source ip address being a private network per RFC 1918.
• Additionally the same router should not receive packets sourced from IP addresses in ranges currently unallocated by IANA.
• These types of ip addresses are frequently called bogons (unallocated ip addresses ranges of IANA).
• Filter these bogons by
• Creating an ACL to match these bogon ip addresses (regularly updated based on changes in IANA's assigned prefixes).
• Use freeware called the Router Audit Tool(RAT) that makes recommendations for router security, including bogon ACLs.
• Also use the Cisco IOS AutoSecure feature.
• It automatically configures ACLs to prevent the use of such  bogus ip addressess