The Practice of Network Security: Deployment Strategies for Production Environments

Introduction

As I am writing this introduction an alert has just come in about a newly discovered vulnerability in Cisco’s CatOS. The vulnerability, a buffer overflow in the CatOS HTTP daemon, is one that is commonly found on devices that have stripped down HTTP daemons used for management purposes.

A couple of years ago this vulnerability would not have raised too many eyebrows. After all, how often is a device within the network infrastructure attacked? Attacks are targeted toward servers, and insecure workstations not routers, switches, firewalls, or other network infrastructure, right? That’s not the case any more. As networks have become more complex so have the attackers that try to infiltrate them. Network security is no longer simply about ...