Saturday, July 28, 2012

ACCESS CONTROL LIST



  • 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.