IKE DoS Attacks are Like So Year 2000

The folks over at Liquidmatrix are in their Cisco Conspiracy Theory Mode again as a result of a Cisco IKE Advisory in VPN3k, IOS, and PIX causing me to lapse lose my normally quite-restrained blogging persona and lapse into bouts of inside jokes.

Must be a slow news week. What next? "Telnet Weak Authentication Vulnerability in IOS" leads to Internet collapse?

In hindsight, it's amazing (I guess the ask for forgiveness not for permission rule was still effect back at Cisco in 2001) that I was even able to present on this stuff (on those ugly templates no doubt!), but if you look at slides 56-72 in a CanSecWest Prezo I did back in April '01 you'll see treatment on DoS issues in IKE although these had been discussed earlier much within the IETF. And if I am talking about it, it can't be rocket science.

And of course I can't go without mentioning the IKE DoS king and the Son of IKE Dos King. Perhaps Venkat (or Earl) will be able to get the Director/VP level approval to blog on this issue. We'll see.

Don't get me wrong developing exploits for silly protocol design errors and saying the sky is falling is all good fun, but let's lose to tone of exasperation.