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Re: IOS Rookit: running hacked binaries certainly places you at risk!

  • From: Gadi Evron
  • Date: Tue May 27 17:13:52 2008
On Tue, 27 May 2008, Jared Mauch wrote:

On May 27, 2008, at 12:02 PM, Gadi Evron wrote:

On Tue, 27 May 2008, Jared Mauch wrote:

On May 27, 2008, at 8:42 AM, Alexander Harrowell wrote:

An alternative rootkit ? Privilege level 16 used by the Lawful Intercept
[12] feature could be abused to do some of this too. Or the other way
around: use a "patched" IOS to keep an eye on Law Enforcement's >operations
on the router as privilege level 15 doesn't allow it and the only
alternative is to sniff the traffic export.
The combination of rootkits and specially privileged Lawful Intercept
functions is a very dangerous one. This was precisely what was exploited in
the now-legendary and still unsolved Vodafone Greece hack.

Perhaps the above should be simplified.

Running a hacked/modded IOS version is a dangerous prospect.

This seems like such a non-event because what is the exploit path to load the image? There needs to be a primary exploit to load the malware image.

*yawn*

I guess we will wait for the next one before waking up, than.


You seem to be missing the point and I'm concerned that wasting my time attempting to educate you and others on this topic is fruitless, but I will attempt the impossible.

Surely you should insure your devices are secured and audit their security. Attack vectors change over time. This case is easily mitigated against if Cisco shipped signed binaries and the platform performed this validation. That's not something unique, but something that is unavailable today.

Then you'd use the memory or manipulate the validation. It's a cat and mouse game the same as any other. I disagree with you there, although these are certainly good steps for Cisco to take.

I state again: Running any random code will certainly put you at risk, this continues to be the case for routers in the same way as it is for the millions of infected PCs.

I await information on the remote router exploit path and the mitigation strategy you allude to in your above bait. Without compromising the router in the first place, either physically by swapping the image media (hard drive, flash of varying varieties) or remotely with some unnamed and perhaps unfound 0-day exploit, the strategy outlined in this thread is not a viable one.

I allude to nothing, Jared.

Anyone following a set of "sane" practices, (watching those flash/disk inserted/removed messages in your syslogs and doing image validation will help mitigate the risk). There's alternate cases that have not been outlined here that could prove to be more problematic and cause you to do some incident response but I will not outline those in this public forum.

Thanks for clarifying these points. I am concerned about how far current methods can take an operator trying to detect badness.

Gadi.