Handbook of Information Security, Volume 1, Key Concepts, Infrastructure, Standards, and Protocols

Routers and Switches

Hans-Peter Dommel, Santa Clara University

Introduction

Principles of Routing and Switching

Routers and Switches in a Nutshell

How Routers Work

How Switches Work

Router and Switch Security

Best Practices in Securing Routers and Switches

Router Vulnerabilities and Attacks

Switch Vulnerabilities and Attacks

Case Studies

Conclusion

Glossary

Cross References

References

INTRODUCTION

Communication networks are systems in hardware and software to facilitate information exchange in a broader arrangement than a single point-to-point link. The telephone network is the most familiar and ubiquitous communication network, designed primarily for voice transmission. A computer network is a communication infrastructure between computing devices in different locations to enable digital information exchange and sharing of resources such as messages, software, compute time, storage space, or peripherals. Finding efficient ways to share communication links is one of the main problems in designing networks. Network design traditionally seeks to optimize several criteria at the same time: minimizing the cost of deployment; maximizing the aggregate bandwidth between two end-points; avoiding “hot spots” where a small number of network nodes and links handle a large percentage of the total traffic; minimizing the latency between any sender and receiver, and maximizing scalability, that is, performance should scale with the number of nodes in the network.

Routers and switches are the ...