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."

Comments

What ever happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what ever happened to Michael Lynn? He quit his job and made the presentation but, where is he today? Is he employed? Is he proud of what he did? Does he feel the price he paid was worth what he gave up for 15 minutes in the spot light? Would he recommend his "high road" choice to others in the future? Does he feel that he really made any difference in the end?

Re:What ever happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Why not earlier?

[scheme]

Why on earth did Cisco not release this earlier? It would save people alot of trouble.

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.

Re:The question is.......

[anticypher]

The answer is.....

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 /.) can add something to this thread.

the AC