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  • Protect the Control Plane – part 2, CoPP.

    Protect the Control Plane – part 2, CoPP.

    Date: 05.06.2016

    Author:


    After we prove that CPU utilization can be easily increased by anyone a time (as shown in the previous blog  post, “Protect the Control Plane – part 1, trivial attack.”), I feel obliged to show how to quickly prevent the cause of potential network and service damage. I will use the Cisco Cat6500 example, but of course, the technique and idea apply to other vendors (if the vendor supports it).

    Cisco in IOS/XE/XR operating systems gives the Control Plane Policing (CoPP) and Control Plane Protection (CPPr) mechanisms. Not going into detail at the moment those two techniques rely on policing unwanted traffic, but both techniques differ. The approach in CoPP puts the policing on aggregate traffic going into the CPU, the CPPr makes the policing more granular and divides the traffic into three types (host, CEF-exception, and transit). I will explain those approaches in detail later on. Implementing CoPP/CPPr is like building QoS with MQC (Modular QoS CLI).

    To limit ICMP spikes,

    1. Define the icmp traffic types with acl and class maps:

    ip access-list extended icmp
    ip icmp any any
    class-map match-all CoPP_ICMP
    match access-group name CoPP_ICMP

    2. Define a policy map

    policy-map CoPP
     class CoPP_ICMP
     police cir 32000 bc 1500 be 1500 conform-action transmit exceed-action drop violate-action drop
     class class-default
     police cir 10000000 bc 312500 be 312500 conform-action transmit exceed-action transmit violate-action transmit

    3. Apply

    control-plane
     service-policy input CoPP

    Testing this we used simultaneous Windows7 based ICMP (regular ping) and ASA sourced large size ping packets. Screen from ASA output during CoPP applying process shows clearly the moment:

    ASA output during CoPP process

    See that Windows ICMP is not changed because of policing (limit the receiving packet rate), not dropping the input traffic.

    Tunnel Rejected ASA Cisco VPN fails to establish

    Now from the network Core point of view, it is clearly seen the CPU spike (moment of DoS) and normalization (moment of CoPP application):

    Control Plane Policing CoPP_3

    And policy map counters show all violating packets and confirm packets.

    Control Plane Interface

    So far so good. Later, I will concentrate on building a “best practice” full control plane security policy. But is worth underlining that the above policy doesn’t care about the remaining control plane traffic (class-default hs transmit actions even for violating traffic).

    Notice: Use CoPP and CPPr carefully. Using those techniques without a theory background can cause outages of network services including management communication with devices.

    Author

    Marcin Bialy

    Marcin Biały is Network and Security Architect with over 14 years of experience, with Service Provider and Enterprise networking background. He used to work for large service providers, global vendors and integration services companies as Network Architect, Leading Architect and Techincal Solution Manager positions. He designed, implemented and supported dozens large scale projects and infrastructure migrations, solved hundreds of tickets and spent hours with CLI and GUI of many flavors. Marcin is also holding industry recognizable certificates such as CCNP, CCNA, CCSI #35269, FCNSP #7207, FCNSA and more.

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