Generic Threats to Routing Protocols
RFC 4593
Network Working Group A. Barbir
Request for Comments: 4593 Nortel
Category: Informational S. Murphy
Sparta, Inc.
Y. Yang
Cisco Systems
October 2006
Generic Threats to Routing Protocols
Status of This Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).
Abstract
Routing protocols are subject to attacks that can harm individual
users or network operations as a whole. This document provides a
description and a summary of generic threats that affect routing
protocols in general. This work describes threats, including threat
sources and capabilities, threat actions, and threat consequences, as
well as a breakdown of routing functions that might be attacked
separately.
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RFC 4593 Generic Threats to Routing Protocols October 2006
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Routing Functions Overview ......................................3
3. Generic Routing Protocol Threat Model ...........................4
3.1. Threat Definitions .........................................4
3.1.1. Threat Sources ......................................4
3.1.1.1. Adversary Motivations ......................5
3.1.1.2. Adversary Capabilities .....................5
3.1.2. Threat Consequences .................................7
3.1.2.1. Threat Consequence Scope ...................9
3.1.2.2. Threat Consequence Zone ...................10
3.1.2.3. Threat Consequence Periods ................10
4. Generally Identifiable Routing Threat Actions ..................11
4.1. Deliberate Exposure .......................................11
4.2. Sniffing ..................................................11
4.3. Traffic Analysis ..........................................12
4.4. Spoofing ..................................................12
4.5. Falsification .............................................13
4.5.1. Falsifications by Originators ......................13
4.5.1.1. Overclaiming ..............................13
4.5.1.2. Misclaiming ...............................16
4.5.2. Falsifications by Forwarders .......................16
4.5.2.1. Misstatement ..............................16
4.6. Interference .........................................17
4.7. Overload .............................................18
5. Security Considerations ........................................18
6. References .....................................................18
6.1. Normative References ......................................18
Appendix A. Acknowledgments .......................................20
Appendix B. Acronyms ..............................................20
1. Introduction
Routing protocols are subject to threats and attacks that can harm
individual users or the network operations as a whole. The document
provides a summary of generic threats that affect routing protocols.
In particular, this work identifies generic threats to routing
protocols that include threat sources, threat actions, and threat
consequences. A breakdown of routing functions that might be
separately attacked is provided.
This work should be considered a precursor to developing a common set
of security requirements for routing protocols. While it is well
known that bad, incomplete, or poor implementations of routing
protocols may, in themselves, lead to routing problems or failures or
may increase the risk of a network's being attacked successfully,
these issues are not considered here. This document only considers
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RFC 4593 Generic Threats to Routing Protocols October 2006
attacks against robust, well-considered implementations of routing
protocols, such as those specified in Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
[4], Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) [5][8], RIP
[6] and BGP [7]. Attacks against implementation-specific weaknesses
and vulnerabilities are out of scope for this document.
The document is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a review of
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