Infrastructure Router Security Technical Implementation Guide Cisco

Using dedicated paths, the OOBM backbone connects the OOBM gateway routers located at the premise of the managed networks and at the NOC. Dedicated links can be deployed using provisioned circuits (ATM, Frame Relay, SONET, T-carrier, and others or VPN technologies such as subscribing to MPLS Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN services) or implementing a secured path with gateway-to-gateway IPsec tunnel. The tunnel mode ensures that the management traffic will be logically separated from any other traffic traversing the same path.Information Assurance Officer

All network devices must present a DoD-approved warning banner prior to a system administrator logging on. The banner should warn any unauthorized user not to proceed. It also should provide clear and unequivocal notice to both authorized and unauthorized personnel that access to the device is subject to monitoring to detect unauthorized usage. Failure to display the required logon warning banner prior to logon attempts will limit DoD's ability to prosecute unauthorized access and also presents the potential to give rise to criminal and civil liability for systems administrators and information systems managers. In addition, DISA's ability to monitor the device's usage is limited unless a proper warning banner is displayed. DoD CIO has issued new, mandatory policy standardizing the wording of "notice and consent" banners and matching user agreements for all Secret and below DoD information systems, including stand-alone systems by releasing DoD CIO Memo, "Policy on Use of Department of Defense (DoD) Information Systems Standard Consent Banner and User Agreement", dated 9 May 2008. The banner is mandatory and deviations are not permitted except as authorized in writing by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information and Identity Assurance. Implementation of this banner verbiage is further directed to all DoD components for all DoD assets via USCYBERCOM CTO 08-008A.Information Assurance Officer

Setting the timeout of the session to 10 minutes or less increases the level of protection afforded critical network components.Information Assurance Officer

Detailed information about the network is sent across the network via SNMP. If this information is discovered by attackers it could be used to trace the network, show the networks topology, and possibly gain access to network devices.Information Assurance Officer

A rogue router could send a fictitious routing update to convince a site’s premise router to send traffic to an incorrect or even a rogue destination. This diverted traffic could be analyzed to learn confidential information of the site’s network, or merely used to disrupt the network’s ability to effectively communicate with other networks.Information Assurance Officer

Numerous vulnerabilities exist with SNMP; therefore, without unique SNMP community names, the risk of compromise is dramatically increased. This is especially true with vendors default community names which are widely known by hackers and other networking experts. If a hacker gains access to these devices and can easily guess the name, this could result in denial of service, interception of sensitive information, or other destructive actions.Information Assurance Officer

By not restricting authorized accounts to their proper privilege level, access to restricted functions may be allowed before authorized personell are trained or experienced enough to use those functions. Network disruptions or outages may occur due to mistakes made by inexperienced persons using accounts with greater privileges than necessary.Information Assurance Officer

A malicious user attempting to gain access to the network device may compromise an account that may be unauthorized for use. The unauthorized account may be a temporary or inactive account that is no longer needed to access the device. Denial of Service, interception of sensitive information, or other destructive actions could potentially take place if an unauthorized account is configured to access the network device.Information Assurance Officer

Administration and management connections performed across a network are inherently dangerous because anyone with a packet sniffer and access to the right LAN segment can acquire the network device account and password information. With this intercepted information they could gain access to the router and cause denial of service attacks, intercept sensitive information, or perform other destructive actions.

Devices can find their startup configuration either in their own NVRAM or access it over the network via TFTP or Remote Copy (rcp). Loading the image from the network is taking a security risk since the image could be intercepted by an attacker who could corrupt the image resulting in a denial of service. Configuration auto-loading can be enabled when the device is connected to a non-operational network. Once the device is connected to an operational (i.e. production) network, configuration auto-loading must be disabled.

Source routing is a feature of IP, whereby individual packets can specify routes. This feature is used in several different network attacks by bypassing perimeter and internal defense mechanisms.Information Assurance Officer

The additional services the router is enabled for increases the risk for an attack since the router will listen for these services. In addition, these services provide an unsecured method for an attacker to gain access to the router. Most recent software versions support remote configuration and monitoring using the World Wide Web's HTTP protocol. In general, HTTP access is equivalent to interactive access to the router. The authentication protocol used for HTTP is equivalent to sending a clear-text password across the network, and, unfortunately, there is no effective provision in HTTP for challenge-based or one-time passwords. This makes HTTP a relatively risky choice for use across the public Internet. Any additional services that are enabled increase the risk for an attack since the router will listen for these services. The HTTPS server may be enabled for administrative access.

Network devices that are not running the latest tested and approved versions of software are vulnerable to network attacks. Running the most current, approved version of system and device software helps the site maintain a stable base of security fixes and patches, as well as enhancements to IP security. Viruses, denial of service attacks, system weaknesses, back doors and other potentially harmful situations could render a system vulnerable, allowing unauthorized access to DoD assets.Information Assurance Officer

Authentication for administrative access to the device is required at all times. A single account of last resort can be created on the device's local database for use in an emergency such as when the authentication server is down or connectivity between the device and the authentication server is not operable. The console or local account of last resort logon credentials must be stored in a sealed envelope and kept in a safe.

Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port that has been left unattended. In addition quickly terminating an idle session will also free up resources committed by the managed network element. Setting the timeout of the session to 10 minutes or less increases the level of protection afforded critical network components.Information Assurance Officer

Enabling write access to the device via SNMP provides a mechanism that can be exploited by an attacker to set configuration variables that can disrupt network operations.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

Remote administration is inherently dangerous because anyone with a sniffer and access to the right LAN segment, could acquire the device account and password information. With this intercepted information they could gain access to the infrastructure and cause denial of service attacks, intercept sensitive information, or perform other destructive actions.

An attacker may attempt to connect to the device using SSH by guessing the authentication method, encryption algorithm, and keys. Limiting the amount of time allowed for authenticating and negotiating the SSH session reduces the window of opportunity for the malicious user attempting to make a connection to the network element.Information Assurance Officer

An attacker may attempt to connect to the device using SSH by guessing the authentication method and authentication key or shared secret. Setting the authentication retry to 3 or less strengthens against a Brute Force attack.Information Assurance Officer

A gratuitous ARP is an ARP broadcast in which the source and destination MAC addresses are the same. It is used to inform the network about a host IP address. A spoofed gratuitous ARP message can cause network mapping information to be stored incorrectly, causing network malfunction.Information Assurance Officer

The Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) switching mode replaces the traditional Cisco routing cache with a data structure that mirrors the entire system routing table. Because there is no need to build cache entries when traffic starts arriving for new destinations, CEF behaves more predictably when presented with large volumes of traffic addressed to many destinations such as a SYN flood attacks. Because many SYN flood attacks use randomized source addresses to which the hosts under attack will reply to, there can be a substantial amount of traffic for a large number of destinations that the router will have to handle. Consequently, routers configured for CEF will perform better under SYN floods directed at hosts inside the network than routers using the traditional cache.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

A TCP connection consists of a three-way handshake message sequence. A connection request is transmitted by the originator, an acknowledgement is returned from the receiver, and then an acceptance of that acknowledgement is sent by the originator. An attacker’s goal in this scenario is to cause a denial of service to the network or device by initiating a high volume of TCP packets, then never sending an acknowledgement, leaving connections in a half-opened state. Without the device having a connection or time threshold for these half-opened sessions, the device risks being a victim of a denial of service attack. Setting a TCP timeout threshold will instruct the device to shut down any incomplete connections. Services such as SSH, BGP, SNMP, LDP, etc. are some services that may be prone to these types of denial of service attacks. If the router does not have any BGP connections with BGP neighbors across WAN links, values could be set to even tighter constraints.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) “r” commands allow users to execute commands on remote systems using a variety of protocols. The BSD "r" commands (e.g., rsh, rlogin, rcp, rdump, rrestore, and rdist) are designed to provide convenient remote access without passwords to services such as remote command execution (rsh), remote login (rlogin), and remote file copy (rcp and rdist). The difficulty with these commands is that they use address-based authentication. An attacker who convinces a server that he is coming from a "trusted" machine can essentially get complete and unrestricted access to a system. The attacker can convince the server by impersonating a trusted machine and using IP address, by confusing DNS so that DNS thinks that the attacker's IP address maps to a trusted machine's name, or by any of a number of other methodsInformation Assurance Officer

Since NTP is used to ensure accurate log file time stamp information, NTP could pose a security risk if a malicious user were able to falsify NTP information. To launch an attack on the NTP infrastructure, a hacker could inject time that would be accepted by NTP clients by spoofing the IP address of a valid NTP server. To mitigate this risk, the time messages must be authenticated by the client before accepting them as a time source. Two NTP-enabled devices can communicate in either client-server mode or peer-to-peer mode (aka "symmetric mode"). The peering mode is configured manually on the device and indicated in the outgoing NTP packets. The fundamental difference is the synchronization behavior: an NTP server can synchronize to a peer with better stratum, whereas it will never synchronize to its client regardless of the client's stratum. From a protocol perspective, NTP clients are no different from the NTP servers. The NTP client can synchronize to multiple NTP servers, select the best server and synchronize with it, or synchronize to the averaged value returned by the servers. A hierarchical model can be used to improve scalability. With this implementation, an NTP client can also become an NTP server providing time to downstream clients at a higher stratum level and of decreasing accuracy than that of its upstream server. To increase availability, NTP peering can be used between NTP servers. In the event the device loses connectivity to its upstream NTP server, it will be able to choose time from one of its peers. The NTP authentication model is opposite of the typical client-server authentication model. NTP authentication enables an NTP client or peer to authenticate time received from their servers and peers. It is not used to authenticate NTP clients because NTP servers do not care about the authenticity of their clients, as they never accept any time from them.

As currently defined, site local addresses are ambiguous and can be present in multiple sites. The address itself does not contain any indication of the site to which it belongs. The use of site-local addresses has the potential to adversely affect network security through leaks, ambiguity and potential misrouting, as documented in section 2 of RFC3879. RFC3879 formally deprecates the IPv6 site-local unicast prefix defined in RFC3513, i.e., 1111111011 binary or FEC0::/10.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

The Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) switching mode replaces the traditional Cisco routing cache with a data structure that mirrors the entire system routing table. Because there is no need to build cache entries when traffic starts arriving for new destinations, CEF behaves more predictably when presented with large volumes of traffic addressed to many destinations—such as a SYN flood attacks that. Because many SYN flood attacks use randomized source addresses to which the hosts under attack will reply to, there can be a substantial amount of traffic for a large number of destinations that the router will have to handle. Consequently, routers configured for CEF will perform better under SYN floods directed at hosts inside the network than routers using the traditional cache. Note: Juniper’s FPC (Flexible PIC Concentrator) architecture with the integrated Packet Forwarding Engine provides similar functionality and capabilities and is far superior than the traditional routing cache that is vulnerable to a DoS attack described above. The forwarding plane on all Juniper M and T Series platforms are built around this architecture and therefore is not configurable. The forwarding plane on all Juniper M and T Series platforms are built around the FPC (Flexible PIC Concentrator) architecture that has similar capabilities as CEF. FPC is not configurable and is totally integrated with the Packet Forwarding Engine; hence, this will always be not a finding. Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) provides a mechanism for IP address spoof protection. When uRPF is enabled on an interface, the router examines all packets received as input on that interface to make sure that the source address and source interface appear in the routing table and match the interface on which the packet was received. If the packet was received from one of the best reverse path routes, the packet is forwarded as normal. If there is no reverse path route on the same interface from which the packet was received, it might mean that the source address was modified. If Unicast RPF does not find a reverse path for the packet, the packet is dropped. If internal nodes automatically configure an address based on a prefix from a bogus Router Advertisement a dangerous situation may exist. An internal host may contact an internal server which responds with a packet that could be routed outside of the network via default routing (because the routers do not recognize the destination address as an internal address). To prevent this, filtering should be applied to network interfaces between internal host LANs and internal server LANs to insure that source addresses have valid prefixes. Information Assurance Officer

SSH Version 1 is a protocol that has never been defined in a standard. Since SSH-1 has inherent design flaws which make it vulnerable to, e.g., man-in-the-middle attacks, it is now generally considered obsolete and should be avoided by explicitly disabling fallback to SSH-1. Information Assurance Officer

ISATAP is an automatic tunnel mechanism that does not provide authentication such as IPSec. As a result of this limitation, ISATAP is thought of as a tool that is used inside the enclave among trusted hosts, which would limit it to internal attacks. ISATAP is a service versus a product, and is readily available to most users. If a user knows the ISATAP router IP address, they can essentially get onto the IPv6 intranet. To control the vulnerability of this tunnel mechanism, it is critical to control the use of protocol 41 and use IPv4 filters to control what IPv4 nodes can send protocol 41 packets to an ISATAP router interface. Although the ISATAP tunneling mechanism is similar to other automatic tunneling mechanisms, such as IPv6 6to4 tunneling, ISATAP is designed for transporting IPv6 packets between sites within an enclave, not between enclaves.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

The use of Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) affords the best methods for controlling user access, authorization levels, and activity logging. By enabling AAA on the routers in conjunction with an authentication server such as TACACS+ or RADIUS, the administrators can easily add or remove user accounts, add or remove command authorizations, and maintain a log of user activity. The use of an authentication server provides the capability to assign router administrators to tiered groups that contain their privilege level that is used for authorization of specific commands. For example, user mode would be authorized for all authenticated administrators while configuration or edit mode should only be granted to those administrators that are permitted to implement router configuration changes.Information Assurance Officer

The Out-of-Band Management (OOBM) network is an IP network used exclusively for the transport of OAM&P data from the network being managed to the OSS components located at the NOC. Its design provides connectivity to each managed network device enabling network management traffic to flow between the managed NEs and the NOC. This allows the use of paths separate from those used by the network being managed. Traffic from the managed network to the management network and vice-versa must be secured via IPSec encapsulation.Information Assurance Officer

The IPSec tunnel end points may be configured on the OOBM gateway routers connecting the managed network and the NOC. They may also be configured on a firewall or VPN concentrator located behind the gateway router. In either case, the crypto access-list used to identify the traffic to be protected must be a mirror (both IP source and destination address) of the crypto access list configured at the remote VPN peer.System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries. Since the managed network and the management network are separate routing domains, separate IGP routing instances must be configured on the router—one for the managed network and one for the OOBM network. System Administrator

If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries. Since the managed network and the management network are separate routing domains, separate IGP routing instances must be configured on the router—one for the managed network and one for the OOBM network. In addition, the routes from the two domains must not be redistributed to each other. System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries. It is imperative that hosts from the managed network are not able to access the OOBM gateway router.System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries such as using interface ACLs or filters at the boundaries between the two networks. System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries. To provide separation, access control lists or filters must be configured to block any traffic from the management network destined for the managed network’s production address spaces.System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

The OOBM access switch will connect to the management interface of the managed network elements. The management interface of the managed network element will be directly connected to the OOBM network. An OOBM interface does not forward transit traffic; thereby, providing complete separation of production and management traffic. Since all management traffic is immediately forwarded into the management network, it is not exposed to possible tampering. The separation also ensures that congestion or failures in the managed network do not affect the management of the device. If the OOBM interface does not have an IP address from the managed network address space, it will not have reachability from the NOC using scalable and normal control plane and forwarding mechanisms.System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

The OOBM access switch will connect to the management interface of the managed network elements. The management interface can be a true OOBM interface or a standard interface functioning as the management interface. In either case, the management interface of the managed network element will be directly connected to the OOBM network. An OOBM interface does not forward transit traffic; thereby, providing complete separation of production and management traffic. Since all management traffic is immediately forwarded into the management network, it is not exposed to possible tampering. The separation also ensures that congestion or failures in the managed network do not affect the management of the device. If the device does not have an OOBM port, the interface functioning as the management interface must be configured so that management traffic does not leak into the managed network and that production traffic does not leak into the management network System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

If the management systems reside within the same layer 2 switching domain as the managed network elements, then separate VLANs will be deployed to provide separation at that level. In this case, the management network still has its own subnet while at the same time it is defined as a unique VLAN. Inter-VLAN routing or the routing of traffic between nodes residing in different subnets requires a router or multi-layer switch (MLS). Access control lists must be used to enforce the boundaries between the management network and the network being managed. All physical and virtual (i.e. MLS SVI) routed interfaces must be configured with ACLs to prevent the leaking of unauthorized traffic from one network to the other. System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

Similar to the OOBM model, when the production network is managed in-band, the management network could also be housed at a NOC that is located locally or remotely at a single or multiple interconnected sites. NOC interconnectivity as well as connectivity between the NOC and the managed networks’ premise routers would be enabled using either provisioned circuits or VPN technologies such as IPSec tunnels or MPLS VPN services. System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

Protecting data sitting in a server VLAN is necessary and can be accomplished using access control lists on VLANs provisioned for servers. Without proper access control of traffic entering or leaving the server VLAN, potential threats such as a denial of service, data corruption, or theft could occur, resulting in the inability to complete mission requirements by authorized users.Information Assurance Officer

Routing in the network containing the tunnel entry point must be configured to direct the intended traffic into the tunnel. Depending on the router products used this may be done by creating routes to a tunnel by name, by address, or by interface. If multiple tunnels are defined or IPv6 interfaces, you must be selective with static routes, policy based routing, or even let the interior gateway protocol (IGP) make the decision since a ipv4 or ipv6 address has been configured on the tunnel. The key is the administrator should carefully plan and configure or let the IGP determine what goes into each tunnel.Information Assurance OfficerECSC-1

The Route Processor (RP) is critical to all network operations as it is the component used to build all forwarding paths for the data plane via control plane processes. It is also instrumental with ongoing network management functions that keep the routers and links available for providing network services. Hence, any disruption to the RP or the control and management planes can result in mission critical network outages. In addition to control plane and management plane traffic that is in the router’s receive path, the RP must also handle other traffic that must be punted to the RP—that is, the traffic must be fast or process switched. This is the result of packets that must be fragmented, require an ICMP response (TTL expiration, unreachable, etc.) have IP options, etc. A DoS attack targeting the RP can be perpetrated either inadvertently or maliciously involving high rates of punted traffic resulting in excessive RP CPU and memory utilization. To maintain network stability, the router must be able to securely handle specific control plane and management plane traffic that is destined to it, as well as other punted traffic. Using the ingress filter on forwarding interfaces is a method that has been used in the past to filter both forwarding path and receiving path traffic. However, this method does not scale well as the number of interfaces grows and the size of the ingress filters grow. Control plane policing can be used to increase security of routers and multilayer switches by protecting the RP from unnecessary or malicious traffic. Filtering and rate limiting the traffic flow of control plane packets can be implemented to protect routers against reconnaissance and DoS attacks allowing the control plane to maintain packet forwarding and protocol states despite an attack or heavy load on the router or multilayer switch. System AdministratorInformation Assurance Officer

Call home services or features will routinely send data such as configuration and diagnostic information to the vendor for routine or emergency analysis and troubleshooting. The risk that transmission of sensitive data sent to unauthorized persons could result in data loss or downtime due to an attack.Information Assurance OfficerNetwork Security Officer

A scope zone is an instance of a connected region of a given scope. Zones of the same scope cannot overlap while zones of a smaller scope will fit completely within a zone of a larger scope. For example, Admin-local scope is smaller than Site-local scope, so the administratively configured boundary fits within the bounds of a site. According to RFC 4007 IPv6 Scoped Address Architecture (section 5), scope zones are also required to be “convex from a routing perspective”—that is, packets routed within a zone must not pass through any links that are outside of the zone. This requirement forces each zone to be one contiguous island rather than a series of separate islands. As stated in the DoD IPv6 IA Guidance for MO3, “One should be able to identify all interfaces of a zone by drawing a closed loop on their network diagram, engulfing some routers and passing through some routers to include only some of their interfaces.” Hence, it is imperative that the network has documented their multicast topology and thereby knows which interfaces are enabled for multicast. Once, this is done, the zones can be scoped as required.System Administrator

Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) is a routing protocol used to build multicast distribution tress for forwarding multicast traffic across the network infrastructure. PIM traffic must be limited to only known PIM neighbors by configuring and binding a PIM neighbor filter to those interfaces that have PIM enabled.Information Assurance Officer

The 6to4 specific filters accomplish the role of endpoint verification and provide assurance that the tunnels are being used properly. This primary guidance assumes that only the designated 6to4 router is allowed to form tunnel packets. If they are being formed inside an enclave and passed to the 6to4 router, they are suspicious and must be dropped. In accordance with DoD IPv6 IA Guidance for MO3 (S5-C7-8), packets as such must be dropped and logged as a security event.Information Assurance Officer

L2TPv3 sessions can be used to transport layer-2 protocols across an IP backbone. These protocols were intended for link-local scope only and are therefore less defended and not as well-known. As stated in DoD IPv6 IA Guidance for MO3 (S4-C7-1), the L2TP tunnels can also carry IP packets that are very difficult to filter because of the additional encapsulation. Hence, it is imperative that L2TP sessions are authenticated prior to transporting traffic.Information Assurance Officer

As specified in RFC 793, TCP utilizes sequence checking to ensure proper ordering of received packets. RFC 793 also specifies that RST (reset) control flags should be processed immediately, without waiting for out of sequence packets to arrive. RFC 793 also requires that sequence numbers are checked against the window size before accepting data or control flags as valid. A router receiving an RST segment will close the TCP session with the BGP peer that is being spoofed; thereby, purging all routes learned from that BGP neighbor. A RST segment is valid as long as the sequence number is within the window. The TCP reset attack is made possible due to the requirements that Reset flags should be processed immediately and that a TCP endpoint must accept out of order packets that are within the range of a window size. This reduces the number of sequence number guesses the attack must make by a factor equivalent to the active window size. Each sequence number guess made by the attacker can be simply incremented by the receiving connections window size. The BGP peering session can protect itself against such an attack by authenticating each TCP segment. The TCP header options include an MD5 signature in every packet and are checked prior to the acceptance and processing of any TCP packet—including RST flags. One way to create havoc in a network is to advertise bogus routes to a network. A rogue router could send a fictitious routing update to convince a BGP router to send traffic to an incorrect or rogue destination. This diverted traffic could be analyzed to learn confidential information of the site’s network, or merely used to disrupt the network’s ability to effectively communicate with other networks. An autonomous system can advertise incorrect information by sending BGP updates messages to routers in a neighboring AS. A malicious AS can advertise a prefix originated from another AS and claim that it is the originator (prefix hijacking). Neighboring autonomous systems receiving this announcement will believe that the malicious AS is the prefix owner and route packets to it.ECSC-1