Deep packet inspection - A security risk?

Yesterday, CERT issued this warning. It describes a vulnerability in a special protocol processing module of the popular SNORT intrusion detection software. Using a maliciously crafted packet, an attacker may gain control over the machine that runs SNORT (!). It is expected that the simplicity of this exploit (a buffer overflow) means that a worm will be appearing soon.

A very similar scenario took place with the Witty worm earlier last year. What do these scenarios have in common? In both cases, a deep-packet inspection security solution, performing protocol analysis, actually became a security weakness. Somewhat similar cases have also repeatedly happened with various anti-virus software packages from different vendors.

Ok, I admit it: The title of this article is probably more controversial than necessary. Firewalls and IPS solutions, which are capable of deep-packet inspection and protocol analysis, by themselves are quite useful. They do not represent a security risk any more than any normal server or desktop does...

Wait a minute...

We do assume that servers and desktops are a security risk of sorts, or else why would we deploy a deep-packet inspection firewall? Why should servers or desktops be a security risk? Because those machines need to parse the various application level requests that come their way over the network. And in doing so, they may be vulnerable to maliciously malformed requests and packets, if the code performing the parsing contains a bug. Buffer overflow exploits are quite common, caused by missing or incorrect range checking of the parameters that are contained within the request.

So, what do we do to combat the weakness introduced by code that has to perform the complex request parsing? We introduce even more code that performs complex request parsing, in the form of a deep-packet inspection firewall or protocol parsing IPS/IDS. Somehow, this does not seem to make any sense. Now, instead of one potentially vulnerable system (the server, for example), we have two potentially vulnerable systems on the network.

Of course, it can be argued that the vendors of the security solutions will be extra careful in writing their protocol parsers. But in the end, the people writing them are still just that: People. Human beings, who are prone to make mistakes once in a while, just like the authors of server and client software sometimes make mistakes.

In general, the more complex the solution, the more room there is for potential vulnerabilities. In this case, the parsing of potentially maliciously formed packets and requests can be quite complex. The attacker is in control here, because the security solution has to parse whatever was sent their way.

There are a class of security solutions, which do not suffer from that particular weakness. Ordinary firewalls, IPSs and IDSs that perform simple signature matching, anomaly detection systems that work on traffic meta data, and so on. All of these solutions have in common that they don't really parse packets or application requests. They look at fixed data fields in packet headers, for example. Not much parsing going on in that case. Or they count packets and packet types. Also, nothing the attacker sends needs to be parsed.

The moral of the story is a well-known security architecture paradigm: Don't trust a single-layer or single-solution approach to security. In this case, the ideal solution would be to pair the protocol-analyzing deep-inspection firewall or IPS/IDS with an anomaly detection system. The former takes care of well-known exploits, the latter of all the zero-day exploits and site specific anomalies. It may even produce signatures for zero-day vulnerabilities on the fly and feed them to the deep-packet inspection firewall or IPS (see here for more on that). In addition, the anomaly detection solution may also notice when the protocol-parsing solution has been commandeered by an attacker for different tasks.

Put in other words: If one needs the analysis and filtering of protocol-parsing and deep-packet inspection, it would be a good idea to have something else watching the watch-man, so to speak.

Juergen

Comments

[ufkwukfdhm]

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[Alfredio]

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[Rechtsanwalt]

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