Subject: [rbridge] What should be the goal in terms of security?

From: marcelo at it.uc3m.es (marcelo bagnulo braun)
Date: Wed Feb 2 05:34:50 2005

Hi all,

after all the discussion about ARP and flooding and so on, i guess that 
an important point should be to clearly define what is the goal of the 
rbridge solution in terms of security. I mean it seems to me that the 
security provided by a router and the security provided by a bridge are 
quite different. I mean, in arp, hijacking a link layer address seems 
to be an important vulnerability, since it may allow sniffing and 
spoofing any interface of the cloud. Besides, the potential DOS attakcs 
that may result because of broacasts used for discovery may be 
important. All this issues are not present in a routed network AFAICT.

So i guess that the first question is: an rbridge solution should 
provide the level of security of a bridged network or the level of 
security of a routed network?

If the goal is to replace routers by rbridges, i would say that the 
routed network security level is required....

any thoughts...?

marcelo

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From: touch at ISI.EDU (Joe Touch)
Date: Wed Feb 2 09:46:07 2005

marcelo bagnulo braun wrote:
> quite different. I mean, in arp, hijacking a link layer address seems to 
> be an important vulnerability, since it may allow sniffing and spoofing 
> any interface of the cloud. Besides, the potential DOS attakcs that may 
> result because of broacasts used for discovery may be important. All 
> this issues are not present in a routed network AFAICT.
> 

The goal, IMO, is to replace bridges by rbridges. rbridges ought to 
provide no worse security than bridges, with better performance 
(cross-section bandwidth, more than anything else IMO).

Joe
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From: sommerfeld at sun.com (Bill Sommerfeld)
Date: Wed Feb 2 10:54:36 2005

On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 08:33, marcelo bagnulo braun wrote:

> 
> If the goal is to replace routers by rbridges

I would hope that this is not our goal.

Maybe we need to state this extremely clearly at the start of every paragraph of the
charter.