North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Your router/switch may be less secure than you think

  • From: Michael Loftis
  • Date: Wed Aug 03 14:11:22 2005


--On August 3, 2005 2:10:10 PM +0100 [email protected] wrote:

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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...

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