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Some questions as usual
  • mandi
    Posts: 207
    hi guys,
    I got some doubts running in my mind ,so as usual  i decided to post here.

    I just finished my ccna,i had a tought when i am doing my ccna,
    There are lots of local exploits being published  for operating systems like linux and windows throught the year.

    i)But the amount of bugs(local exploitation bugs such as an bof,stack offerflow,race condition bla bla) i had seen for the cisco ios is very rare,it is just an proprietary operating system
    why there isn't many such  bugs for cisco ios ?

    ii) i dont know what kind of security features make it special,as far as i have searched i had seen some presentations by fx phenoelit other than that i couldn't find any promising materials regarding that ,for me it looks like an area which wasn't explored much(just my personal view,correct me if i am wrong),why is this ?

    iii)is there any materials for understanding the internal ios implementations and things ?


    Next question  is about how to structure my learning towards local exploitation?

    here are the things i had done till now
    i)studied operating systems concepts book by "operating system concepts silberschatz" till chapter 14(at least 3 times,so i feel i am ok with the os theory part)
    ii)i feel i had good basic understanding about networks,i had completed ccna and rhce training.
    iii)regarding coding i am just a novice,i just know what are things and for what it is used(just having some theoretical knowledge)
    iv)have basic understanding of web-application technologies and attcks


    1)i want some advice from you guys (just another guy asking this 1000th time)how can i continue from here to become good  in writing local exploits and reverse engg?
    what are the things i should start from here like learning processor,assembly,h/w etc.,i don't know in which order i should begin,hope some one will clarify me..





  • m0rph
    Posts: 332
    Sadly, Cisco IOS exploitation is a very under-researched area. There's a couple of issues with researching it:

    1) It's proprietary software that is very hard to obtain for free
    2) Some aspects of its usage required the purchasing of licenses
    3) There is currently no way to debug applications within the IOS itself

    The only attack vectors I've heard of for breaking into one is to either brute-force/obtain login credentials, or to have physical access to the device and boot it into rommon, and either reset the password or load a new ios onto it.

    while( !(succeed = try() ) );
  • Sh3llc0d3
    Posts: 1,910
    I really would like to look further into Cisco ios exploits etc as we use cisco equipment a lot here. Anyway... here's something you may find interesting, although it's not exploiting the OS but meh;

    http://www.sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/malicious/iostrojan-owns-router_33324
  • mandi
    Posts: 207
    @Sh3llc0d3--->
    any ideas for doing the same things for the IOS versions below 12.3 ? because some of the devices i had seen in my surroundings are running older versions of IOS ,between thanks for the share mate :)


    I would also suggest you to take a look at this book

    http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Software-Architecture-Professional-Development/dp/1587058162