Category: Router

Open Compute Project 2019

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OCP has the mission to “design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing”.

OCP had its global 2019 summit recently. Some interesting trends on hyperscale networks are discussed here and here with the use of F16 fabric network with its a focus on higher bandwidth but also performance at the right cost instead of at any cost. The heart of this new F16 fabric is the Minipack switch, with contribution from Arista which Facebook says will consume 50 percent less power and space than the Backpack switch it replaces in the network.  It is a 128x100Gb switch and uses a Broadcom Tomahawk-3 Asic. Quote: “a path from a rack in one building to a rack in another building over Fabric Aggregator was as many as 24 hops long before. With F16, same-fabric network paths are always the best case of six hops, and building-to-building flows always take eight hops. This results in half the number of intrafabric network hops and one-third the number of interfabric network hops between servers.”

Intel announced an industry collaboration around Platform Root of Trust at the Open Compute Project 2019 summit.

There’s a talk on Stratum and the use of P4 and Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) for SDN, by Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and Google. Tencent has a use case for disaggregating their monolithic network into a modular switch with a network of controllers instead of a single controller.

Smaller data centers at the edge is another trend.

Facebook storage stack and its evolution- https://thenewstack.io/facebook-storage/, mentions OCP and the disaggregated server model which separates server components across different racks.

More on cold storage in a Facebook data center – https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/18/facebook-builds-new-data-centers-for-cold-storage

VPNFilter IoT Router Malware

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Over 500k routers and gateways are estimated to be infected with malware dubbed VPNFilter, first reported in https://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/05/VPNFilter.html .

It has 3 stages. In stage 1 it adds itself to crontab to remain after a reboot. In stage 2 it adds a plugin architecture. In stage 3 it adds modules which instruct it to do specific things.  A factory reset and router restart in protected network was recommended to remove it. Disabling remote administration and changing passwords is recommended to prevent reinfection.

The 3rd stage module modifies IPtables rules, enabling mitm attacks and javascript injection.

“The first action taken by the ssler module is to configure the device’s iptables to redirect all traffic destined for port 80 to its local service listening on port 8888. It starts by using the insmod command to insert three iptables modules into the kernel (ip_tables.ko, iptable_filter.ko, iptable_nat.ko) and then executes the following shell commands:

  • iptables -I INPUT -p tcp –dport 8888 -j ACCEPT
  • iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp –dport 80 -j REDIRECT –to-port 8888
  • Example: ./ssler logs src:192.168.201.0/24 dst:10.0.0.0/16

-A PREROUTING -s 192.168.201.0/24 -d 10.0.0.0/16 -p tcp -m tcp –dport 80 -j REDIRECT –to-ports 8888

To ensure that these rules do not get removed, ssler deletes them and then adds them back approximately every four minutes.“

More behaviors of the malware are described at https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2018/05/27/vpnfilter-botnet-a-sophoslabs-analysis-part-2/ including photobucket request, fake CA certs claiming Microsoft issued them and ipify lookups.

YARA rules for detection –

https://github.com/Neo23x0/signature-base/blob/master/yara/apt_vpnfilter.yar

https://github.com/Neo23x0/sigma/blob/master/rules/proxy/proxy_ua_apt.yml#L33

YARA (yet another recursive acronym) is a format to specify rules match malware based on string patterns, regular expressions and their frequency of occurrence. A guide to writing effective ones is here.

User-Agent rule –


alert http any any -> any any (msg:"VPNFilter malware User-Agent"; content:"Mozilla/6.1 (compatible|3B| MSIE 9.0|3B| Windows NT 5.3|3B| Trident/5.0)"; http_user_agent; sid:2; rev:1;)

view raw

vpnfilter-ua.rule

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Ipify self-ip address querying service, with json output. http://api.ipify.org/