Network security is a completely changing area; new devices like IDS (Intrusion Detection systems), IPS (Intrusion Prevention systems), and Honeypots are modifying the way people think about security. Companies are spending thousand of dollars on new security devices, but forgetting the basic, the first line of defense: the border router.
Although a lot of people may think that routers don’t need to be protect, they are completely wrong. A lot of secure problems appear all time against this kind of device and most of them are vulnerable.
In this article we will give you 8 steps, easy to follow, to minimize your Cisco router exposure by turning off some unused services, applying some access control and applying some security options available on that.
- Control Access to your router
- Restrict telnet access to it
- Block Spoof/Malicious packets
- Restrict SNMP
- Encrypt all passwords
- Disable all unused services
- Add some security options
- Log everything
1. Control Access to your router
The first thing to do is apply some rules to restrict all external access to some ports of the router. You can block all ports, but it is not always necessary. These commands bellow will protect your router against some reconnaissance attacks and, obviously, will restrict access to these ports:
access-list 110 deny tcp any host $ip eq 9
access-list 110 deny tcp any host $ip eq 13
access-list 110 deny tcp any host $ip eq 19
access-list 110 deny tcp any host $ip eq 23
access-list 110 deny tcp any host $ip eq 79
int x0/0
access-group in 110
Where $ip is your router IP and x0/0 is your external interface. We Will always use this convention in this article.
2. Restrict telnet access to it
Telnet is not a very safe protocol to use, but if you really need to use it (you should always use ssh) you might want to restrict all access to it (remember that all your traffic will be unencrypted). The best way to accomplish that is using a standard access-list and the access-class command.
access-list 50 deny any log
line vty 0 4
access-class 50 in
exec-timeout 5 0
Where $ip is the IP address allowed to telnet the router.
3. Block Spoof/Malicious packets
You must never allow loopback/reserved IP address from the Internet reach your external interface and you can reject broadcast and multicast addresses too.
access-list 111 deny ip 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.255 any
access-list 111 deny ip 172.16.0.0 0.0.255.255 any
access-list 111 deny ip 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any
access-list 111 deny ip host 0.0.0.0 any
access-list 111 deny ip 224.0.0.0 31.255.255.255 any
access-list 111 deny icmp any any redirect
int x0/0
access-group in 111
4. Restrict SNMP
SNMP must always be restrict, unless you want some malicious person getting a lot of information from your network
access-list 112 permit ip any any
interface x0/0
access-group 112 in
And if you are not going to use SNMP at all, disable it:
5. Encrypt all passwords
A very important thing to do is protect all your passwords using the powerful algorithm as possible.
The password from exec mode, that grants privileged access to the IOS system, Can be set using a MD5 hash, which is the strongest option available on the Cisco IOS.
All other passwords, you can encrypt using the Vigenere cipher that is not Very strong, but can help. To do that, you can use the service password-encryption Command that encrypts all passwords present in you system.
6. Disable all unused services
- 6.1 – Disable Echo, Chargen and discard
no service udp-small-servers
- 6.2 – Disable finger
- 6.3 – Disable the httpd interface
- 6.4 – Disable ntp (if you are not using it)
7. Add some security options
- 7.1 – Disable source routing
- 7.2 – Disable Proxy Arp
- 7.3 – Disable ICMP redirects
no ip redirects
- 7.4 – Disable Multicast route Caching
no ip mroute-cache
- 7.5 – Disable CDP
- 7.6 – Disable direct broadcast (protect against Smurf attacks)
8. Log everything
To finish, you must log everything on an outside Log Server. You must everything from all your systems and always analyze the logs.
logging $ip
where $ip is the ip of your log server (configured as a Syslog server)
Conclusion
With these simple steps you can add a lot of security to your router, protecting it against a lot of possible attacks, increasing your network security.
Only as an example, you can see the nmap result before and after applying these options:
Before:
Interesting ports on (192.168.1.1):
Port State Service
7/tcp open echo
9/tcp open discard
13/tcp open daytime
19/tcp open chargen
23/tcp open telnet
79/tcp open finger
80/tcp open http
Remote OS guesses: AS5200, Cisco 2501/5260/5300 terminal server IOS 11.3.6(T1),
Cisco IOS 11.3 – 12.0(11)
After:
Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1
open and 1 closed TCP port
All 1601 scanned ports on (192.168.1.1) are: filtered
Too many fingerprints match this host for me to give an accurate OS guess
Nmap run completed — 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 403 seconds
- 10 Steps to Secure and Manage Your Passwords
- Gmail and Facebook Users Advised to Secure Their Accounts Immediately
- Pentagon’s Proactive Approach to Cybersecurity – Over 50,000 Vulnerability Reports Since 2016
- Windows Hardening – Key Points To Remember
- Top 10 Fundamental Questions for Network Security
- How to Remove x-powered-by in Apache/PHP for Enhanced Security
- 12 Point Checklist – PHP Security Best Practices
- Secure Programming Checklist – 2023 Compilation Guide
- The Ultimate Network Security Checklist – 2023 Complete Guide
- A Comprehensive Guide to Crafting Strong Passwords
