Protocol analysis and vulnerabilities of Cisco’s autonomic network

Abstract

Autonomic systems are smart independent systems that do not need human intervention to operate. These systems are implemented to manage themselves; they should be self-configured, self-secured against malicious attacks, self-healing in terms of the ability to survive interrupted processes and self-optimised. One form of these systems is the Autonomic Network (AN) developed by IETF and deployed on Cisco systems. The main goal of this work is to analyse the autonomic networking protocol from a malicious attacker’s perspective, then use this analysis to find vulnerabilities within the protocol to gain unauthorised access into the network or hinder its performance. In the course of this work, five different vulnerabilities will be presented, one of which allows systems to crash remotely by knowing their IPv6 address.