Hacker ‘handshake’ hole found in common firewalls

Over on the post “Hacker ‘handshake’ hole found in common firewalls” contains this text:

“Hacker ‘handshake’ hole found in common firewalls
NSS Labs tested Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Juniper, the Palo Alto Networks, and SonicWall firewalls

By Ellen Messmer, Network World
April 12, 2011 03:33 PM ET

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Some of the most commonly-used firewalls are subject to a hacker exploit that lets an attacker trick a firewall and get into an internal network as a trusted IP connection.

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NSS Labs recently tested half a dozen network firewalls to evaluate security weaknesses, and all but one of them was found not to be vulnerable to a type of attack called the ‘TCP Split Handshake Attack’ that lets a hacker remotely fool the firewall into thinking an IP connection is a trusted one behind the firewall.

‘If the firewall thinks you’re inside, the security policy it applies to you is an internal one, and you can run a scan to see where machines are,’ says Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs. An attacker can then pretty much run wild in the network because the firewall mistakenly considers the IP address as a trusted one coming from behind the firewall
This week NSS Labs published its ‘Network Firewall 2011 Comparative Test Results’ research paper about the findings. NSS Labs is a well-known product testing organization that evaluates a wide range of security gear, sometimes as vendor-sponsored comparative tests, sometimes as completely independent tests under its own determination. The Network Firewall 2011 Comparative Test published this week is in the latter category, where costs were assumed wholly by NSS Labs itself.

NSS Labs independently tested the Check Point Power-1 11065, the Cisco ASA 5585-40, the Fortinet Fortigate 3950, the Juniper SRX 5800, the Palo Alto Networks PA-4020, and the SonicWall NSA E8500.

Moy pointed out that vendors were generally reluctant to participate in the battery of tests that NSS Labs did and that in fact about half the firewall equipment in the tests was contributed directly by end-user customers, such as financial services firms, which supported the tests because they wanted to find out about possible vulnerabilities in their firewalls.

The NSS Labs report says, ‘Five of the six products allowed external attackers to bypass the firewall and become an internal ‘trusted machine.” The only firewall tested by NSS labs that didn’t was the Check Point one.”