Cisco IOS XE Switch RTR Security Technical Implementation Guide
Rules, Groups, and Values defined within the XCCDF Benchmark
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The Cisco perimeter switch 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 -
SRG-NET-000364-RTR-000206
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The Cisco switch 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 switch must be configured to have all inactive layer 3 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 switch must be configured to protect against or limit the effects of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks by employing control plane protection.
The Route Processor (RP) is critical to all network operations because it is the component used to build all forwarding paths for the data plane via control plane processes. It is also instrumental...Rule High Severity -
The Cisco switch 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 switch must be configured to log all packets that have been dropped at interfaces via an ACL.
Auditing and logging are key components of any security architecture. It is essential for security personnel to know what is being done or attempted to be done, and by whom, to compile an accurate ...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco switch 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 switch must be configured to disable the auxiliary port unless it is connected to a secured modem providing encryption and authentication.
The use of POTS lines to modems connecting to network devices provides clear text of authentication traffic over commercial circuits that could be captured and used to compromise the network. Addit...Rule Low Severity -
The Cisco perimeter switch 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 switch must be configured to restrict it from accepting outbound IP packets that contain an illegitimate address in the source address field via egress filter or by enabling Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF).
A compromised host in an enclave can be used by a malicious platform to launch cyberattacks on third parties. This is a common practice in "botnets", which are a collection of compromised computers...Rule High Severity -
The Cisco perimeter switch must be configured to filter ingress traffic at the external interface on an inbound direction.
Access lists are used to separate data traffic into that which it will route (permitted packets) and that which it will not route (denied packets). Secure configuration of switches makes use of acc...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco perimeter switch must be configured to have Proxy ARP disabled on all external interfaces.
When Proxy ARP is enabled on a switch, it allows that switch to extend the network (at Layer 2) across multiple interfaces (LAN segments). Because proxy ARP allows hosts from different LAN segments...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco switch 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 switch must be configured to reject inbound route advertisements from a customer edge (CE) switch 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 swi...Rule Medium Severity -
The Cisco BGP switch must be configured to reject outbound route advertisements for any prefixes that do not belong to any customers or the local autonomous system (AS).
Advertisement of routes by an autonomous system for networks that do not belong to any of its customers pulls traffic away from the authorized network. This causes a denial of service (DoS) on the ...Rule Medium Severity -
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
Node 2
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