Re: [RPSEC] about the meeting at IETF 66
Curtis Villamizar <curtis@occnc.com> Mon, 10 July 2006 20:49 UTC
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To: sandy@tislabs.com
Subject: Re: [RPSEC] about the meeting at IETF 66
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 07 Jul 2006 14:48:41 EDT." <200607071848.k67ImflF001709@tislabs.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 16:55:39 -0400
From: Curtis Villamizar <curtis@occnc.com>
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In message <200607071848.k67ImflF001709@tislabs.com> sandy@tislabs.com writes: > > In the last month there have been discussions on the mailing list of > the status of the milestone changes, and announcements of two new > drafts, and a suggestion of looking at the > draft-manral-rpsec-existing-crypto-02.txt draft. > > That sounds to me like we have some topics for discussion at the rpsec > meeting. > > But no agenda was posted. > > I hope the lack of an agenda does not mean that we won't meet. > > Do the wg chairs have an agenda in mind? > > --Sandy Sandy, When the topic of security has been discussed in IDR I and a few others had been reminding the WG that common provider practices provide a great deal of protection which makes up for weak cryptographic protection of MD5 and no amount of cryptographic protection prevents denail of service attacks which those provider practices very effectively prevent. Briefly, the practices are inbound filtering of BGP and OSPF and use of GTSM. IS-IS is not forwarded at all so not an issue. By not allowing OSPF and BGP from outside the network to be forwarded into the network, a perimeter is established, where inside denial of service and other attacks are not possible, so long as the perimeter is not seriously compromised. At the perimeter, BGP is spoken with the immediate peer router and GTSM can be used. An OSPF adjacency could be established but in practice rarely if ever is. GTSM provides protection against attacks from more than one hop away. If the immediate peer router is compromised. then a denial of service attack from the immediate peer is possible but for modern routers that denial of service would only affect the peering with the compromised router, which being compromised already is a more serious threat due to ability to inject false routing information with the peering up. Both protocol (OSPF) and port (BGP, TCP 179) packet filtering and GTSM's TTL based filtering can be performed by routers at full line rate making a denial of service attack against routing based on traffic levels impossible. This is not the case for cryptographic protection alone. ISPs have not been very concerned about the weakness in MD5 since any form of cryptographic protection is regarded as an additional redundant and only partially effective form of protection. The filtering capability and traffic attack hardenning on external peerings can be cited as a requirement for routers. In practice these are far more important requirements than good crypto for an ISP network. A caveat of the filtering based protection alone is that any compromise within the protected perimeter opens the possiblity of attack from within the perimeter. This is a house of cards problem. If a core router today often with many tens of OC192c interfaces were compromised, there are is very substantial potentials for denial of service attacks, not just against routing. There would also be the ability to inject false routing information. Any major provider today, being that they are attacked more or less constantly, does not allow routing peerings outside the set of infrastructure routers except route filtered peerings to customers at the network perimeter, route filtered or unfiltered peering with major peer providers, and one way peerings to their own NMS hosts or subnets. Of these the most credible threat is from NMS hosts, both on external subnets, and embedded within the infrastructure (the pizza box 1U server in the POP used by many providers, though often these are just 100baseT interfaces). Perhaps rpsec-existing-crypto is not the place for this information, but it would be useful for RPSEC to document this as BCP. I also recognize that there may be other applications of IP routing where traffic volume is not as much of an issue (adhoc wireless for example) and where either compromise of infrastructure hosts might be possible (physical compromise, for example) or where the channels cannot be assumed to be secure (wireless or other). In those situations, crypto security is needed and filtering is ineffective. Any BCP on this topic should recognize both types of situation and point out where each type of solution is applicable. And of course if fiber carrying bundles of OC192c or other 10Gb/s or higher encapsulations is compromised, there is no technology today that can protect agains the resulting denial of service attack. At that point the link (or set of logical links) has to be shut down. btw- If you really want to address lack of physical security better, promoting strong encryption on non-volitile storage would be a good idea. It was well known that telco personnel were stealing the flash cards from a certain type of router until the router was modified such that some minimal disassembly was required and logging and NM traps were added if the flash was removed. Those flash were being sold as PC hardware but also had complete router configurations on them. If you really wanted to be secure, the entire filesystem, not just access passwords, would be encrypted such that the operator would have to provide information if power were completely removed (not just across a reload). Physically removing hardware would do nothing initially until the crypto was cracked which would at least take time, and as long as the physical compromise was detected and acted on, keys elsewhere could be changed before cracking completed. Please let me know, on the WG list or offline, how and if this sort of thing might fit into RPSEC. Curtis _______________________________________________ RPSEC mailing list RPSEC@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rpsec
- [RPSEC] about the meeting at IETF 66 sandy
- Re: [RPSEC] about the meeting at IETF 66 Curtis Villamizar