Manav - 

On Sep 12, 2013, at 10:40 AM, Bhatia, Manav (Manav) wrote:

> Anton,
> 
> I understand that once the attacker can insert LSAs in the flooding domain 
> then there are several things that can be done. However, in most cases the 
> attacks can be easily identified and a corrective action can be easily taken. 
> In this particular case, the attack is a little more insidious and its not 
> straight forward catching the erring LSA.
> 
> Since its something that's missing in rfc 2328 we will keep having newer 
> implementations that will carry this bug. A short one page RFC that updates 
> 2328 imo would do no harm. Do you see any issue in publishing such an RFC?

There is NO bug in RFC 2328. The RFC clearly states that a Router-LSA will be 
advertised with the same Router-ID for both the LSID and the Advertising 
router. I don't think it is productive to write "short" RFCs for every attack 
and believe the CERT Alert is a better and swifter mechanism for disseminating 
information on attacks. 
Note that my implementation was not susceptible to this attack as the 
vulnerability was identified in a packet mutation suite many years back.

I spoke to Gabi offline about authoring an informational RFC that discusses 
classes of OSPF attacks and possible mechanisms to thwart them. 

Thanks,
Acee

> 
> I have written a short post on what the issue in 2328 is and how it can be 
> exploited to launch an attack.
> http://routingfreak.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/how-bad-is-the-ospf-vulnerability-exposed-by-black-hat/
> 
> Cheers, Manav
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Anton Smirnov [mailto:[email protected]] 
>> Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 4:46 PM
>> To: Bhatia, Manav (Manav)
>> Cc: Gabi Nakibly; Acee Lindem; [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: [OSPF] Dropping malformed LSAs (was: OSPF - 
>> Owning the Routing Table Attack)
>> 
>>    If attacker has joined flooding domain and can inject an 
>> LSA into LSDB then it can screw up routing in the domain. 
>> Methods such as pretending being an ABR/ASBR and advertise 
>> destinations with good metric are almost impossible to combat 
>> once authentication barrier is penetrated.
>>    This particular vulnerability allows attacker to bring 
>> network down in style but if this vulnerability is not 
>> present in the particular network then attacker will simply 
>> resort to other numerous possibilities to affect routing via 
>> LSA injection. If attacker can inject LSA into LSDB then your 
>> network is at his mercy. Give or take one particular method 
>> is a detail.
>>    So IMO we don't need a draft on this particular 
>> vulnerability. It might be of some limited interest to 
>> document all known methods to exploit LSA injection which 
>> would include this vulnerability but what value would this 
>> RFC bring? Such methods are regularly published in academic 
>> literature since 90-th.
>> 
>>    IMO we need good (reliable, secure, manageable etc) 
>> methods of authenticating adjacencies. KARP group is working 
>> on that. We *might* benefit from a work on mechanism to 
>> prevent any router to originate reachable LSA on behalf of 
>> any other router (kind of LSA signing). But work on what will 
>> go wrong when intended security barriers are broken IMO is not needed.
>> 
>> Anton
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 09/12/2013 05:42 AM, Bhatia, Manav (Manav) wrote:
>>> Hi Gabi,
>>> 
>>> [clipped]
>>> 
>>>> Nonetheless, I am sure that there are more OSPF vendors out there 
>>>> that are still vulnerable to the attack and do not check for this. 
>>>> Moreover, since this check is not part of the standard, in most 
>>>> likelihood future OSPF implementations will also be vulnerable.
>>>> 
>>> [clipped]
>>> 
>>>> I am willing to write a draft describing this mitigation 
>> measure. I 
>>>> would appreciate the list's thoughts on this.
>>> I think it's a good idea to write a draft that describes 
>> the attack and what implementations MUST do to avoid it.
>>> 
>>> Cheers, Manav
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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