Environments with the RIP protocol.
Oleg Petukhov, lawyer in the field of international law and personal data protection, information security specialist security, protection of information and personal data.
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The Dynamic Routing Protocol RIP (Routing Information Protocol) is best suited for small and medium-sized IP networks with multiple paths. Before we start considering security issues, let's look at how this protocol works.
The term "multiple path network" in this case means that packet transmission between any two endpoints of the combined network is possible via several different routes.
The RIP routing Information Protocol is an internal remote vector type routing protocol. Being one of the earliest protocols for the exchange of route information, it is still extremely common in local networks due to its simplicity of implementation.
Dynamic routing protocols are designed to find the optimal route in networks with multiple paths. The criteria for recognizing the optimal route may be several characteristics. First of all, it is the number of hops that a packet needs to make in order to get from the sender's network to the recipient's network. The transition refers to the passage of the network. For example, if you need to go through 172.16.1.0/16 to get from the 192.168.1.0/24 network to the 10.10.10.0/8 network, then the number of hops will be two.
Obviously, this method of determining the optimal route is effective only if the network is homogeneous. If different routes have different bandwidth, then it is likely that the optimal route will be one with less bandwidth than several others.
The RIP protocol will choose ABC as the route from A to C, without taking into account that the bandwidth of the channel on the BC segment will be lower than on the BDC. This is a significant disadvantage of RIP. Other important disadvantages are the limited number of nodes and the lack of support for network masks.
Currently, the RIP protocol for IP networks is represented by two versions. In the RIP v. protocol1 masks are not supported, i.e. it distributes information between routers only about network numbers and distances to them, but not about the masks of these networks, assuming that all addresses belong to standard classes A, B or C. RIP v.2 transmits data about network masks, so it meets modern requirements to a greater extent.
Initially, addressing in IP networks was based on classes: the first bits determined the network class, and by network class it was possible to tell how many bits were allocated to the network number and node number. There were five classes in this:
class A 0 7-bit network address 24-bit interface address;
Class B 10 14-bit network address 16-bit interface address;
Class C 110 21-bit network address 8-bit interface address;
class D 1110 multicast address;
Class E 11110 is reserved.
Most RIP protocol implementations use the simplest metric - the number of transit nodes, i.e. intermediate routers, that a packet needs to overcome in order to reach the destination network.
The RIP routing protocol has another significant limitation. The distance between any two nodes in the network must not exceed 15 transit nodes, otherwise the node will be considered unreachable. As a rule, even a small corporate network with several branches may encounter this limitation when using RIP.
Speaking about the advantages of this routing protocol, it is worth noting the relative ease of configuration. For example, in Cisco routers, RIP is configured using three commands. By comparison, other protocols require more complex configuration.
I should also note that the RIP protocol is supported by Windows and Linux server operating systems. At the same time, only RIP version 2 is supported in Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has abandoned support for other protocols in this version of Windows.
So, we have briefly reviewed the basic principles of the RIP dynamic routing protocol. In the next post, we will move on to security issues.
The main threats to the RIP routing protocol are:
false routes;
downgrading the RIP protocol version;
hacking the MD 5 hash.
