[83036] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Your router/switch may be less secure than you think
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Loftis)
Wed Aug 3 14:10:43 2005
Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:09:51 -0600
From: Michael Loftis <mloftis@wgops.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <OF414B6824.C5499A02-ON80257052.00479ACC-80257052.00485791@radianz.com>
X-MailScanner-From: mloftis@wgops.com
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
--On August 3, 2005 2:10:10 PM +0100 Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
<...>
> Contrary to what some may be worrying about, it it not the GSRs
> that are most at risk. It is those old 2500's that are connected to
> your customers. Imagine that one of those customer routers is
> exploited, the hacker installs a tunnel, and then proceeds to
> anonymously probe the customer's network. This is the real risk
> and it may very well be happening right now to one of your customers.
While I hate to possibly give ideas to (real) black hats in a public form
but no doubt some have thought of this anyway....injecting routes into BGP
to steal traffic. A crafty enough person could move traffic back over a
tunnel or series of tunnels to be snooped. Yes, theoretically, it'd be
noticed fairly soon, but how quickly is soon enough for $xyz critical
application? That worries me more, because it only takes one insecure
unfiltered setup (or even partially unfiltered setup) to announce something
they shouldn't. Hopefully it wouldn't be global-reaching, but, it could
be. How much do you trust your peers? How much should you? How much do
you have to? For customers, it's obvious, for transit peers, maybe less so.
Just my two cents worth...
<...>
