North American Network Operators Group

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Re: IS-IS authentication

  • From: Danny McPherson
  • Date: Wed Jul 12 12:37:30 2000

> The deployed form of IS-IS uses CLNP not IP for transmission,
> making it less vulnerable to inter-domain attacks -- provided
> that there is no inter-domain CLNP connectivity (generally
> true, but not always true).  IS-IS is not particularly any
> less vulnerable from intra-domain attacks.

Actually, IS-IS runs directly over the link layer, it 
doesn't employ CLNP or IP (unless you're using some 
tunneling hack such as IS-IS over GRE, but...). 

As for intra-domain CLNP packet forwarding, though a 
few networks had supported this for a while, fewer (do 
any?) ISPs do it today and most new IS-IS supporting 
routers don't provide capability for anything other 
than IP packet forwarding.  As for inter-domain CLNP 
-- ha :-)

> Hence, the IETF IS-IS WG has a draft proposal for adding OSPF-like
> MD5 authentication into IS-IS.  The addition of MD5 authentication
> into IS-IS specifications was driven by some large Tier-1 ISPs
> who happen to use IS-IS internally and felt there was significant
> risk without it.

Oh, I certainly agree that it's useful, though IS-IS is clearly 
not as vulnerable as IP-based protocols.

-danny