Critical Vulnerabilities in Network Equipment: Past, Present and Future

Retour à la liste des conférenciers et sessions
Écoutez la diffusion
In this talk, we will discuss common vulnerability patterns in network equipment (consumer and enterprise routers, firewalls, VPN, TLS accelerators, switches, WAF, etc). This critical infrastructure is unfortunately a lot more vulnerable than most people believe, although its security stance has improved within the last few years. We will go through the history of these vulnerabilities, why they occur and what should we expect to happen in the future, as exploit protections in these devices improve.

Routers are considered easy to hack, and that's kind of true. But is that much harder to hack a home router than an enterprise firewall? Think twice before answering!

The purpose of this talk is to demonstrate the similarities in inner workings, technology, hardware and vulnerability density between every piece of network equipment, be it for home or enterprise.

We will walk through specific examples of vulnerabilities found in these equipments in the past and present. Vulnerability patterns will be identified, and we will discuss why they keep occuring and what circumstances led to them appearing in the first place.

Finally, we will discuss future trends for vulnerabilities in network equipment. And because it can't all be negative, we will also discuss how the constant hardening of these devices will make exploitation much harder (but far from impossible :) in the future.