Re: Should nmap cause a DoS on cisco routers?

[Florian Weimer <fweimer () bfk de>]

* Roland Dobbins:

> On Jul 1, 2010, at 5:23 PM, Thierry Zoller wrote:
>
> > If a device crashes when being scanned - it's a vulnerability.
>
> It sounds to me as if what happened was that he ended up driving the
> CPUs of the devices in question to 100%, and they stopped handling
> control-plane traffic and fell over.  There are infrastructure
> self-protection best current practices (BCPs) which can be deployed
> to defend against infrastructure-targeted DoS.

Not necessarily.  Fingerprinting is known to crash tons of devices.
And it's certainly a bug worth fixing.  Many shops write their own
scripts to gather statistics from networking devices, and it's really
annoying when those scripts bring down devices (be it due to brittle
protocol parsers, or memory leaks in the server code).

-- 
Florian Weimer                <fweimer () bfk de>
BFK edv-consulting GmbH       http://www.bfk.de/
Kriegsstraße 100              tel: +49-721-96201-1
D-76133 Karlsruhe             fax: +49-721-96201-99

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