Your router/switch may be less secure than you think

Wed Aug 3 18:09:51 UTC 2005

--On August 3, 2005 2:10:10 PM +0100 Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com 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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