Now that we have learnt how does a perimeter router serve its purposes in a network, we shall proceed to learning how to secure the perimeter routers as well as how to disable services and do logging.
Securing perimeter routers
When a perimeter router is deployed, it is exposed to many forms of danger while serving its purpose such as filtering incoming packets. I will explain two types of filtering which can be employed to safeguard the perimeter router. They are ingress and egress.
Ingress filtering
As we know, source IP addresses are stored in data packets' header. This will be filtered through the router. However, IP addresses can be spoofed and we can never know if that packet contains malicious contents.
Ingress filtering relies on scanning incoming packets to confirm their source and validity by referring to a database. If a packet does not appear to originate from the IP address it claims to be from, the packet can be held and/or refused by the network. This helps to protect the users in that network from attacks such as IP spoofing which can be deployed by hackers to perform unethical actions on the network.
Egress filtering
Egress filtering is the somewhat the opposite of ingress filtering. It filters outbound traffic generating from within the network. By adding a few rules to the filtering, we can protect the network form a variety of malicious attacks. For example, we can set the filter to not allow packets that contains a source IP address not assigned to our network. We can also prevent users in our network from performing illegal actions such as IP spoofing!
Disabling unnecessary router services
Most of the time you would not need all the services running in the router to be enabled. By disabling some of the services, you are able to free up some memory for the router to perform more efficiently!
Logging
Logging is used to take down important information which can be commonly found in auditing. The reason why this is important is because through logging, we can detect system errors and attempt to correct it. This can be done in many ways such as through the command line interface console of the router and through the terminal line.
Through this blog post, I was able to better understand secure perimeter routers & disable services & logging. I understand that the secure perimeter router is meant as a filtering system which protects the internal network. I am able to also understand the two types of filtering involved in the perimeter routers which are ingress filtering and egress filtering. This blog post has also allowed me to understand that disabling unnecessary router services can help free up memory for the router which will allow the router to focus on doing the filtering and forwarding of packets which is its essential role.
ReplyDelete-Amos Lee