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Cisco Patches 'Black Hat' IOS Flaw
thursnick writes "eWeek is reporting that Cisco has finally issued a comprehensive fix for a critical IOS vulnerability that set off a firestorm of controversy at the Black Hat Briefings earlier this year. The patches come more than three months after former ISS researcher Michael Lynn quit his job to present the first-ever example of exploit shellcode in Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating System), a presentation that landed him in legal hot water. Cisco's advisory effectively confirmed Lynn's summer warning that the flaw could be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands or cause a denial-of-service on compromised routers."
If you read TFA, the bug involved system timers and how they were handled. Given that this probably affects most of the system functions, it's not surprising that it would take a while to make the changes and test it. Think about how long it took to fix the VM bugs in linux 2.4, this probably a change of similar magnitude.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
He's alive and well as far as I know. I saw him at Toorcon this year, but didn't speak to him.. (He was a speaker and gave a good talk on Reverse Engineering)
I know that he has a new job and I while I obviously can't speak for him, I got the impression that he felt as if he did his duty the security community. As an amateur member of that community, I'd thought that he put principle before pay and deserves our respect.
Simon.
Mike is working at Juniper, and doing well (Juniper pays better than ISS, apparently, and their code is cleaner than Cisco's, plus they have some ethics). He feels he did the right thing. So do a lot of folks in the US military and intelligence communities, who are very very pissed off at Cisco for exposing them to a security risk of this magnitude and trying to cover it up. They consider Mike a hero, so he has some very useful new friends...
The answer is.....
/.) can add something to this thread.
This code has been out for a few months now, and many select beta sites have been testing it in production environments. The first few iterations had some serious (crash and reboot every few hours) problems, but it (12.2.15T1thru17) has been in production use on several edge routers for a month with no noticable problems. Cisco didn't just patch the one 'sploit published, they categorised the class of exploits and went about fixing many different possible attack vectors or watching for suspicious behaviour that could indicate a compromised system. That is what took several months even before Michael's talk, and its been in testing (and re-patching and recursion testing) since then. The announcement today is because they are confident their fix is solid, but anyone staying at the bleeding edge of IOS releases has been using it since at least June.
I'd say its solid, but I'm not rolling out the latest version on everything until others add some real world stress testing. I'm sure there will be several more newly introduced bugs uncovered in the new few months, and the timer checks usually result in a panic reload, not optimal for stable systems with SLAs and big money riding on them.
I'm also not in a rush to roll this out, because for the moment there are no known exploits running around. Maybe Effugas or some of the IOS engineers (I know you read
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on