[NEWS] Nortel VPN Router Malformed Packet DoS

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  Nortel VPN Router Malformed Packet DoS
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SUMMARY

NTA Monitor have discovered a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability in the 
Nortel VPN Router products (which were previously known as Nortel 
Contivity) while performing a VPN security test for a customer.

The vulnerability allows attackers to send a single malformed IKE packet 
that in turn will cause the Nortel VPN router to crash.

DETAILS

Vulnerable Systems:
 * Nortel VPN router models 1010
 * Nortel VPN router models 1050
 * Nortel VPN router models 1100
 * Nortel VPN router models 600
 * Nortel VPN router models 1600
 * Nortel VPN router models 1700
 * Nortel VPN router models 2600
 * Nortel VPN router models 2700
 * Nortel VPN router models 4500
 * Nortel VPN router models 4600
 * Nortel VPN router models 5000

Immune Systems:
 * Nortel VPN software version V5.05_200 or later

The vulnerability is triggered by sending a single IPSec IKE packet with a 
malformed ISAKMP header.  On receipt of this malformed packet, the VPN 
router will crash immediately.  The crash occurs every time such a 
malformed packet is sent.

Sometimes the affected VPN router will automatically reboot (which takes 
about five minutes), but sometimes it will stay down indefinitely and 
require manual intervention to restart it.  In tests, the VPN router 
automatically rebooted around 80% of the time, and needed to be manually 
reset on the remaining 20%.

The VPN router does not log the malformed packet, even if the logging 
level is turned up to maximum.  This is probably because the packet causes 
the router to crash before it has a chance to log it.

It is not normally possible to block public inbound access to the IKE 
service on the VPN router, because it is required for remote access IPSec 
operation. As IKE uses the UDP transport protocol, the attacker may forge 
the packet's source IP address to avoid identification, or to prevent the 
victim from blocking the traffic with ingress filtering. In addition, 
current IDS/IPS systems will probably not be able to detect the attack, 
because the malformed packet looks very similar to a normal IKE packet.

It is possible for attackers to detect and fingerprint Nortel VPN routers 
using the IKE fingerprinting techniques that we have previously published 
in VPN security white papers.  Therefore users should not assume that 
their VPN router is invisible just because it's not published in the DNS 
and is not running any TCP services.

Vendor Status:
The vendor has released a fix located at:  
<http://www130.nortelnetworks.com/cgi-bin/eserv/cs/main.jsp> 
http://www130.nortelnetworks.com/cgi-bin/eserv/cs/main.jsp


ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by  <mailto:[email protected]> 
Roy Hills .
The original article can be found at:  
<http://www.nta-monitor.com/news/vpn-flaws/nortel/nortel-client/> 
http://www.nta-monitor.com/news/vpn-flaws/nortel/nortel-client/



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