James, You hit the nail on the head there.
I was trying to avoid overkill. In Telecoms networks you would have Management plane Control/Signalling plane User/Data plane Usually these are separated at SDH or ATM level as separate VCs. The Enterprise view would be to physically separate networks Internet DMZ Core But in an ISP you are not going to build a physical separate network. Then the private cloud view is that all of these are together, separated by network and server virtualisation. I think the danger is trying to use Enterprise models for Service Providers, where even those Enterprise models are blurring. Thanks John -----Original Message----- From: uknof [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Bensley Sent: 21 September 2016 09:38 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [uknof] ISP Security architecture On 15 September 2016 at 11:46, John Bourke <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > > > Touchy subject, but can anyone share some war stories about how they > keep raw Internet traffic away from ISP operational systems, which be > definition need to talk to the equipment which carries that Internet traffic. I'm not 100% certain of what you are looking for here but if you search through the list archives for the c-nsp and j-nsp mailing lists (others too I'm sure) you'll see many discussions about ISPs moving the Internet into a dedicated L3VPN. In that example keeping the internet traffic in a dedicated L3VPN and say having a separate dedicated L3VPN for management traffic segregates the two traffic types but the NMS/OSS/BSS systems still have access to the routers (if you configure them to allow management access from within that management L3VPN). I’m not sure where the horror stories fit in to this that specifically relate to the Internet? A decent ISP (IMO) should have good control plane and infrastructure protection in place, so there should be no threat. I think the main issues from the Internet into the ISPs OSS/BSS systems is DDoS traffic, either targeted at the ISP or a downstream customer that fills the pipes and they can’t even get management access to their devices (perhaps no out of band connectivity for example). But control plane attacks can come from within the IPS, not just out on the Internet and can be fairly well defended against. Cheers, James. John Bourke
