Attacks on the control plane and how to defend against them

The control plane, as we saw earlier in this chapter, contains the protocols and processes that communicate between network devices in order to move packets from end to end through the network. In this category, we have Layer 2 protocols such as the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)/Rapid STP (RSTP); Layer 3 routing protocols that learn network topologies such as the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) or the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) that advertise equipment information to their neighbors; the Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) that establishes a guaranteed end-to-end (E2E) channel with pre-defined QoS; the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) that is used for network reachability testing; and others.

In Chapter 10, Discovering LAN, IP, and TCP/UDP-Based Attacks, and in Chapter 12, Attacking Routing Protocols, we will get into the details of how to protect the network protocols themselves. What we talk about in...