Security Basics mailing list archives

Re: ARP Spoof Question


From: Martin Brecher <listuser () mb-itconsulting com>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 19:33:23 +0200

The Fueley wrote:

How would that apply to a layer 3 switch/router? Actually the packaging says
that I have a Residential Gateway/Router/Firewall. Aren't gateways layer 7
devices? While switches are layer 2 devices, they deal with MAC addresses
right? Maybe a "smart" switch knows which MAC addresses are allowed on the
network? Or am I missing it all here?

Most modern managed switches allow you to limit the number of MAC addresses the switch learns on each port. This way you can assign a specific NIC to a sepcific switch port, as well as disallow any unwanted traffic.

Cabletron (now Enterasys) had a nice technique known as SecureFastSwitching (which is nowadays partially resembled by the VLAN, Link Aggregation and STP standards), which made some decent VLANing possible.

For example:
VLAN #1 with all corporate-public servers and VLAN #2 with all the confidential servers.
When a new station gets deployed it gets added to VLAN #1 by the IT staff.
All unknown stations are completely kept of the network.
Only people with a higher clearance level (i.e. the managers who need access to the confidential finance server) get added to VLAN#2. Other ideas are to keep the switches own network-accessible management ports in another VLAN only accessible by the IT staff. And another VLAN for the Quake servers, of course :-)

Greetings,
Martin
--
"History has shown us, that strength may be useless,
when faced with terrorism." -- Jean-Luc Picard
PGP/GPG key at http://www.stupid-design.com/martin/publickey.asc


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