Evaluation on Security Risks of the Router on the Network

Based on network security risks and router vulnerabilities, you can evaluate security risks encountered by the router and provide suggestions on suppressing security risks. The following table describes security risks encountered by the router and risk suppression measures.

**Table 1** Security risks of the router and the risk suppression measure
Security Risk	Vulnerabilities of the router	Risk Evaluation	Risk Suppression Measure
Denial of service (DoS) attack	Limited processing capabilities of control and management planes Failure to authenticate source addresses due to openness of IP networks, which causes traffic flooding and address spoofing	The processing capabilities of control and management planes are limited, and traffic flooding is likely to be triggered and damages the router greatly. Risk evaluation: high	Strengthen network access control. Limit the traffic to the control and management planes on the forwarding plane.
Information disclosure	Insecure access channels Insufficient access control capabilities due to openness of IP networks	Insecure access channels can be easily used by attackers to initiate attacks. For example, insufficient right control measures for router accounts and the openness of IP networks may easily cause attacks. Risk evaluation: high	Deactivate insecure access channels. Strengthen account and rights management. Plan access control policies properly.
Damaging information integrity	Lack of necessary integrity check measures during transmission of IP packets	Lots of communication protocols have no integrity check mechanism and the openness of IP networks causes information to be tampered with. Risk evaluation: medium	Implement message integrity check. Use secure channels to transmit important information.
Unauthorized access	The router system is complex and fails to grant users permission for access to commands and management information base (MIBs) on a per-user basis. The diagnosis and debugging system needs to query internal system information, which also causes potential security risks. An IP network is open and access paths to the IP network are uncontrollable. As a result, the IP network may suffer unauthorized access from untrusted networks.	After a user obtains the right at a level, the user may access information beyond the role due to lack of information isolation measures based on a smaller granularity. The IP network is open, and therefore may encounter unauthorized access from untrusted networks. Risk evaluation: medium	Adopt the command authorization mechanism of the terminal access controller access control system (TACACS) to avoid the misuse of commands. Select SNMPv3 and configure the MIB view to limit the access to MIBs. Strengthen network access control.
Identity spoofing	The router is unable to authenticate all source addresses due to openness of IP networks.	Address spoofing attacks may easily occur, which causes forwarding interruption or system overload. Risk evaluation: medium	Enable unicast reverse path forwarding (URPF) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Snooping to avoid attacks.
Replay attack	In the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, Layer 3 and lower layers cannot process serial numbers, which makes it easy to initiate replay attacks. In addition, the router has insufficient capability of processing session requests. As a result, system overload occurs.	The capability of processing session requests is insufficient, which may cause system overload. Risk evaluation: high	Use the network processor (NP) to respond to request messages, and the dynamic whitelist to suppress new sessions and retain existing sessions.
Computer viruses	The router has insufficient capability of processing traffic flooding caused by network viruses, and therefore system overload occurs.	Traffic flooding occurs after a computer is infected with network viruses, which exhausts bandwidth resources and causes CPU overload. Risk evaluation: high	Enhance carriers' IT management capabilities. Configure rate limitation to avoid overload.
Carelessness of engineers	The router system is extremely complex, and data configuration is prone to errors. The router has insufficient capability of handling traffic flooding caused by topology flapping or loop topology.	Incorrect configurations may damage services. Topology flapping and loop topology may cause the router to be overloaded. Risk evaluation: medium	Strengthen trainings, improve skills, enhance carriers' IT management capabilities, and avoid man-made errors. Configure loop detection and suppression mechanisms to intelligently prevent man-made errors.
Physical intrusion	The router allocates many permissions for users who access through the panel interface. Attackers can use these permissions to operate and configure the router system incorrectly.	If users who log in through the panel interface configure the router maliciously, major problems may be caused. Physical access to telecom networks is usually under strict control. Risk evaluation: low	Enhance physical and environmental security control to avoid security accidents due to physical access and environment accidents.