Cisco IOS XR Router RTR Security Technical Implementation Guide
Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark
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SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000203
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SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000204
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SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000205
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SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000206
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The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to drop IPv6 packets containing a Hop-by-Hop or Destination Option extension header with an undefined option type.
The optional and extensible natures of the IPv6 extension headers require higher scrutiny since many implementations do not always drop packets with headers that it cannot recognize, and hence coul...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to enforce approved authorizations for controlling the flow of information within the network based on organization-defined information flow control policies.
Information flow control regulates where information is allowed to travel within a network and between interconnected networks. The flow of all network traffic must be monitored and controlled so i...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to have all inactive interfaces disabled.
An inactive interface is rarely monitored or controlled and may expose a network to an undetected attack on that interface. Unauthorized personnel with access to the communication facility could ga...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to have IP directed broadcast disabled on all interfaces.
An IP directed broadcast is a datagram sent to the broadcast address of a subnet that is not directly attached to the sending machine. The directed broadcast is routed through the network as a unic...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to have Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) mask reply messages disabled on all external interfaces.
The ICMP supports IP traffic by relaying information about paths, routes, and network conditions. Routers automatically send ICMP messages under a wide variety of conditions. Mask Reply ICMP messag...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to produce audit records containing information to establish where the events occurred.
Without establishing where events occurred, it is impossible to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. In order to compile an accurate risk assessment ...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to deny network traffic by default and allow network traffic by exception.
A deny-all, permit-by-exception network communications traffic policy ensures that only connections that are essential and approved are allowed. This requirement applies to both inbound and outbou...Rule High Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to only allow incoming communications from authorized sources to be routed to authorized destinations.
Unrestricted traffic may contain malicious traffic that poses a threat to an enclave or to other connected networks. Additionally, unrestricted traffic may transit a network, which uses bandwidth a...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to filter traffic destined to the enclave in accordance with the guidelines contained in DoD Instruction 8551.1.
Vulnerability assessments must be reviewed by the System Administrator, and protocols must be approved by the Information Assurance (IA) staff before entering the enclave. Access control lists (AC...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to block all outbound management traffic.
For in-band management, the management network must have its own subnet in order to enforce control and access boundaries provided by Layer 3 network nodes, such as routers and firewalls. Managemen...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco out-of-band management (OOBM) gateway router must be configured to transport management traffic to the Network Operations Center (NOC) via dedicated circuit, MPLS/VPN service, or IPsec tunnel.
Using dedicated paths, the OOBM backbone connects the OOBM gateway routers located at the edge of the managed network and at the NOC. Dedicated links can be deployed using provisioned circuits or M...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco out-of-band management (OOBM) gateway router must be configured to block any traffic destined to itself that is not sourced from the OOBM network or the Network Operations Center (NOC).
If the gateway router is not a dedicated device for the OOBM network, several safeguards must be implemented for containment of management and production traffic boundaries. It is imperative that h...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco router must be configured to only permit management traffic that ingresses and egresses the out-of-band management (OOBM) interface.
The OOBM access switch will connect to the management interface of the managed network elements. The management interface can be a true OOBM interface or a standard interface functioning as the man...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco BGP router must be configured to reject inbound route advertisements from a customer edge (CE) router for prefixes that are not allocated to that customer.
As a best practice, a service provider should only accept customer prefixes that have been assigned to that customer and any peering autonomous systems. A multi-homed customer with BGP speaking rou...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco BGP router 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 router 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 router 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 routers. It is easier to construct appropriate ingress filters...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco MPLS router must be configured to synchronize 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 router begins forwarding packets using the new adjacency before the LDP label exchange completes between the peers on that link. P...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco PE router 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 router providing MPLS Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS) must be configured to have the appropriate pseudowire ID for each attachment circuit.
VPWS is an L2VPN technology that provides a virtual circuit (aka pseudowire) between two PE routers to forward Layer 2 frames between two customer-edge routers or switches through an MPLS-enabled I...Rule High Severity -
The Cisco PE router must be configured to enforce the split-horizon rule for all pseudowires within a Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) bridge domain.
A virtual forwarding instance (VFI) must be created on each participating PE router for each customer VLAN using VPLS for carrier Ethernet services. The VFI specifies the VPN ID of a VPLS domain, t...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco PE router providing Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) must be configured to have traffic storm control thresholds on CE-facing interfaces.
A traffic storm occurs when packets flood a VPLS bridge, creating excessive traffic and degrading network performance. Traffic storm control prevents VPLS bridge disruption by suppressing traffic w...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco PE router must be configured to block any traffic that is destined to IP core infrastructure.
IP/MPLS networks providing VPN and transit services must provide, at the least, the same level of protection against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and intrusions as Layer 2 networks. Although the...Rule High Severity -
The Cisco PE router must be configured to enforce a Quality-of-Service (QoS) policy to provide preferred treatment for mission-critical applications.
Different applications have unique requirements and toleration levels for delay, jitter, bandwidth, packet loss, and availability. To manage the multitude of applications and services, a network re...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco PE router must be configured to enforce a Quality-of-Service (QoS) policy to limit the effects of packet flooding denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
DoS is a condition when a resource is not available for legitimate users. Packet flooding distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are referred to as volumetric attacks and have the objective o...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco multicast Rendezvous Point (RP) router must be configured to filter Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) Join messages received from the Designated Router (DR) for any undesirable multicast groups.
MSDP peering between networks enables sharing of multicast source information. Enclaves with an existing multicast topology using PIM-SM can configure their RP routers to peer with MSDP routers. As...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco multicast Rendezvous Point (RP) must be configured to rate limit the number of Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) Register messages.
When a new source starts transmitting in a PIM Sparse Mode network, the Designated Router (DR) will encapsulate the multicast packets into register messages and forward them to the RP using unicast...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco multicast Designated Router (DR) must be configured to filter the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Report messages to allow hosts to join a multicast group only from sources that have been approved by the organization.
Real-time multicast traffic can entail multiple large flows of data. Large unicast flows tend to be fairly isolated (i.e., someone doing a file download here or there), whereas multicast can have b...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco multicast Designated Router (DR) must be configured to limit the number of mroute states resulting from Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) and Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Host Membership Reports.
The current multicast paradigm can let any host join any multicast group at any time by sending an IGMP or MLD membership report to the DR. In a Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) Sparse Mode net...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) router must be configured to filter received source-active multicast advertisements for any undesirable multicast groups and sources.
The interoperability of BGP extensions for interdomain multicast routing and MSDP enables seamless connectivity of multicast domains between autonomous systems. MP-BGP advertises the unicast prefix...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco BGP router must be configured to enable the Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM).
As described in RFC 3682, GTSM is designed to protect a router's IP-based control plane from DoS attacks. Many attacks focused on CPU load and line-card overload can be prevented by implementing GT...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to drop IPv6 packets containing a Destination Option header with invalid option type values.
These options are intended to be for the Hop-by-Hop header only. The optional and extensible natures of the IPv6 extension headers require higher scrutiny since many implementations do not always d...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to drop IPv6 packets containing an extension header with the Endpoint Identification option.
The optional and extensible natures of the IPv6 extension headers require higher scrutiny since many implementations do not always drop packets with headers that it cannot recognize, and hence coul...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to drop IPv6 packets containing the NSAP address option within Destination Option header.
The optional and extensible natures of the IPv6 extension headers require higher scrutiny since many implementations do not always drop packets with headers that it cannot recognize, and hence coul...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter router must be configured to drop IPv6 undetermined transport packets.
One of the fragmentation weaknesses known in IPv6 is the undetermined transport packet. This packet contains an undetermined protocol due to fragmentation. Depending on the length of the IPv6 exten...Rule Medium Severity -
SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000201
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The Cisco router must be configured to have Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) unreachable messages disabled on all external interfaces.
The ICMP supports IP traffic by relaying information about paths, routes, and network conditions. Routers automatically send ICMP messages under a wide variety of conditions. Host unreachable ICMP ...Rule Medium Severity -
SRG-NET-000362-RTR-000114
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SRG-NET-000019-RTR-000009
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SRG-NET-000018-RTR-000001
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SRG-NET-000168-RTR-000078
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The Cisco router must be configured to enable routing protocol authentication using FIPS 198-1 algorithms with keys not exceeding 180 days of lifetime.
A rogue router could send a fictitious routing update to convince a site's perimeter router to send traffic to an incorrect or even a rogue destination. This diverted traffic could be analyzed to l...Rule Medium Severity -
SRG-NET-000019-RTR-000007
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SRG-NET-000131-RTR-000035
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The Cisco router must be configured to have all non-essential capabilities disabled.
A compromised router introduces risk to the entire network infrastructure, as well as data resources that are accessible via the network. The perimeter defense has no oversight or control of attack...Rule Low Severity -
SRG-NET-000205-RTR-000001
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The Cisco router must be configured to restrict traffic destined to itself.
The route processor handles traffic destined to the router—the key component used to build forwarding paths and is instrumental with all network management functions. Hence, any disruption or DoS a...Rule High Severity
Node 2
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