1 Routers
1.1 What are routes?
According to a wireless network expert routers are physical devices at which its main role is to link multiple networks together. Router function at layer 3, which is considered the network layer of the OSI model (Mitchell, n.d) Routers are much more capable than hubs and switches because it’s perform the traffic directing functions on the internet and carry the data over a network which is more complex function than hubs and switches.
1.2 Types of Routers:
Routers has various types, and each type is suitable for certain markets and conditions, the most common routers are wired and wireless router, core router and edge router.
1.2.1 Wired and Wireless Routers
This type of router are most common whether in office or houses. A wireless router is a device that perform the function of a router, and it has an access point. In addition, it used to provide the access to the internet, or a computer network. In addition, it filters the traffic of the incoming and outgoing packets according on the destination and the source IP addresses. Moreover, the wireless routers can acts a firewall as well. (Thakur, n,d)
1.2.2 Core Router
A core router is a router that forwards packets to computer hosts within a network but not between networks. It’s contrasted with an edge routers where the packets are between a self-contained network and other outside networks along a network backbone or in the middle. (Thakur, n.d)
1.2.3 Edge Router
This type of router’s location at the verge of the ISP network, they often configured to suit the external protocols for instance border getaway protocol (BGP) and links to other BGP networks that are available in a large company or in another ISP network. (Thakur, n.d)
1.3 What Functions Can A Router Do?
They key function of routers is to connect different networks together and deliver data across the network. However, it passes through different functionalities which are as the follow:
First, it restricts the broadcast to the LAN. The router will break down the networks with large number of host into smaller networks. Second, it acts as the ‘default getaway’ to be able to connect the other network as a host. Following that it translates protocols from Wired Ethernet to Wi-Fi or Ethernet to CATV/ Consequently, it moves the data between networks from one interface to another and this process continues. Routers move data through loops and make sure that the data will not drop or expired by the time to live. Finally, router calculates the best path for the data to be travels which is the shortest and least cost. (“What is a Router”, 2013)
2 Types of Attacks on Routers
Routers is one of the most important components of any network so they are often targeted by the attackers. There are many types of attacks two of attacks such as Distributed denial of service attack and Man in the Middle Attack.
2.1 Distributed Denial of Service Attack
Denial of Service Attack is kind of attack in which the attacker target the victim’s network resources such as bandwidth, memory, atc,. So that the victim may stop responding to legitimate users (Yadav, n,d) Normally a DDoS attack is carried out by attackers in the following way:
1) Scanning for any Vulnerable host from where the attack can be carried out.
2) Next attacker can insert the tools to the discovered vulnerable systems so they can carry out the attack.
In addition some of the DDOS attacks that can happened to router are:
1) ARP Poisoning (Address Resolution Protocol) In this attack the attacker looks for ARP request packets in the network& once detect a request packet they form the packet with another MAC address and send it as reply. So they will manipulate with the ARP table which referred as ARP poisoning where the actual MAC will be denied of any further services. (Waichalm, 2013)
2) Ping of death: PING is stands for Packet InterNet Groper. Which it mainly checks the connectivity between a network with given IP addresses. Ping of death is when the attacker forms a packet containing more than 65536 bytes which the IP protocol can’t handle this amount of size and when such packets is sent it will crash the victim’s machine. (Waichalm, 2013)
3) Smurf attack: In this attack the attacker sends out a lot of ICMP echo request packet to different hosts in the network. When the victim gets immersed with ICMP echo reply packet, the victim will not be able to process any other thing because the system will get busy in the processing the echo reply messages. (Waichalm, 2013)
The static below shows the results of the largest attacks at the beginning of 2014 that Symantec’s application detect on the routers.
