The above is the exact title of a Gartner research note published some days ago. Its main thesis is that an increased convergence of carriers’ MPLS and Internet infrastructures onto shared IP infrastructures requires that enterprises re-evaluate their security and performance risks.
While I do not agree with the overall line of reasoning in the paper, it still highlights a number of interesting points when it comes to MPLS security. Which in turn reminds me of quite some stuff we’ve done in the past, mainly our Black Hat Europe 2009 talk “All your packets are belong to us – Attacking backbone technologies”. Today we’ll release an updated version of the accompanying whitepaper as a kind-of technical report. Its title is “Practical Attacks against MPLS or Carrier Ethernet Networks” and it can be found here.
Enjoy reading,
Enno
btw: for those of you who have actually read the Gartner paper… did you notice their repeated reference to customer RFIs/RFPs not covering a carrier’s separation between their public Internet and MPLS infrastructures? Here’s a document that describes how a given carrier’s trustworthiness might be evaluated and which furthermore contains an excerpt from an RFI (written back in 2006!) which, amongst others, ask for this very point…