CISC-RT-000560 - The Cisco BGP router must be configured to use the maximum prefixes feature to protect against route table flooding and prefix de-aggregation attacks.

Information

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 router, prefix de-aggregation occurs when the announcement of a large prefix is fragmented into a collection of smaller prefix announcements.

In 1997, misconfigured routers in the Florida Internet Exchange network (AS7007) de-aggregated every prefix in their routing table and started advertising the first /24 block of each of these prefixes as their own. Faced with this additional burden, the internal routers became overloaded and crashed repeatedly. This caused prefixes advertised by these routers to disappear from routing tables and reappear when the routers came back online. As the routers came back after crashing, they were flooded with the routing table information by their neighbors. The flood of information would again overwhelm the routers and cause them to crash. This process of route flapping served to destabilize not only the surrounding network but also the entire Internet. Routers trying to reach those addresses would choose the smaller, more specific /24 blocks first. This caused backbone networks throughout North America and Europe to crash.

Maximum prefix limits on peer connections combined with aggressive prefix-size filtering of customers' reachability advertisements will effectively mitigate the de-aggregation risk. BGP maximum prefix must be used on all eBGP routers to limit the number of prefixes that it should receive from a particular neighbor, whether customer or peering AS. Consider each neighbor and how many routes they should be advertising and set a threshold slightly higher than the number expected.

Solution

Configure the router to use the maximum prefixes feature to protect against route table flooding and prefix de-aggregation attacks as shown in the example below.

RP/0/0/CPU0:R2(config)#router bgp xx
RP/0/0/CPU0:R2(config-bgp)#neighbor x1.24.4
RP/0/0/CPU0:R2(config-bgp-nbr)#address-family ipv4 unicast
RP/0/0/CPU0:R2(config-bgp-nbr-af)#maximum-prefix 444 discard-extra-paths
RP/0/0/CPU0:R2(config-bgp-nbr-af)#end

Item Details

Audit Name: DISA STIG Cisco IOS-XR Router RTR v3r1

Category: SYSTEM AND COMMUNICATIONS PROTECTION

Plugin: Cisco

Control ID: 397834a5840222758f5452ec1e45cbe2dbe957a80057ae9b5e87eee656fe168e

Detections

Analytics

CISC-RT-000560 - The Cisco BGP router must be configured to use the maximum prefixes feature to protect against route table flooding and prefix de-aggregation attacks.

Information

Solution

See Also

Item Details