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Cisco NX OS Switch RTR Security Technical Implementation Guide

Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark

  • The Cisco BGP switch must be configured to use the maximum prefixes feature to protect against route table flooding and prefix de-aggregation attacks.

    The effects of prefix de-aggregation can degrade switch performance due to the size of routing tables and also result in black-holing legitimate traffic. Initiated by an attacker or a misconfigured...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The Cisco BGP switch must be configured to use its loopback address as the source address for iBGP peering sessions.

    Using a loopback address as the source address offers a multitude of uses for security, access, management, and scalability of the BGP switches. It is easier to construct appropriate ingress filter...
    Rule Low Severity
  • The Cisco MPLS switch must be configured to synchronize Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) and LDP to minimize packet loss when an IGP adjacency is established prior to LDP peers completing label exchange.

    Packet loss can occur when an IGP adjacency is established and the switch begins forwarding packets using the new adjacency before the LDP label exchange completes between the peers on that link. P...
    Rule Low Severity
  • The MPLS switch with RSVP-TE enabled must be configured with message pacing to adjust maximum burst and maximum number of RSVP messages to an output queue based on the link speed and input queue size of adjacent core switches.

    RSVP-TE can be used to perform constraint-based routing when building LSP tunnels within the network core that will support QoS and traffic engineering requirements. RSVP-TE is also used to enable ...
    Rule Low Severity
  • The Cisco MPLS switch must be configured to have TTL Propagation disabled.

    The head end of the label-switched path (LSP), the label edge switch (LER) will decrement the IP packet's time-to-live (TTL) value by one and then copy the value to the MPLS TTL field. At each labe...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The Cisco PE switch must be configured to have each Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) instance with the appropriate Route Target (RT).

    The primary security model for an MPLS L3VPN as well as a VRF-lite infrastructure is traffic separation. Each interface can only be associated to one VRF, which is the fundamental framework for tra...
    Rule High Severity
  • The Cisco PE switch must be configured to have each VRF with the appropriate Route Distinguisher (RD).

    An RD provides uniqueness to the customer address spaces within the MPLS L3VPN infrastructure. The concept of the VPN-IPv4 and VPN-IPv6 address families consists of the RD prepended before the IP a...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The Cisco PE switch providing MPLS Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) services must be configured to authenticate targeted Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) sessions used to exchange virtual circuit (VC) information using a FIPS-approved message authentication code algorithm.

    LDP provides the signaling required for setting up and tearing down pseudowires (virtual circuits used to transport Layer 2 frames) across an MPLS IP core network. Using a targeted LDP session, eac...
    Rule Medium Severity
  • The Cisco PE switch providing MPLS Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) must be configured to have the appropriate virtual circuit identification (VC ID) for each attachment circuit.

    VPWS is an L2VPN technology that provides a virtual circuit between two PE switches to forward Layer 2 frames between two customer-edge switches or switches through an MPLS-enabled IP core. The ing...
    Rule High Severity
  • The Cisco PE switch providing Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) must be configured to have all attachment circuits defined to the virtual forwarding instance (VFI) with the globally unique VPN ID assigned for each customer VLAN.

    VPLS defines an architecture that delivers Ethernet multipoint services over an MPLS network. Customer Layer 2 frames are forwarded across the MPLS core via pseudowires using IEEE 802.1q Ethernet b...
    Rule High Severity

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