[AusNOG] Simon Hackett's presentation from Comms Day yesterday - NBN fibre on copper prices

[Mark ZZZ Smith]

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> From: Bevan Slattery <bevan at slattery.net.au>
>To: Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc at mmc.com.au>; George Fong <george at lateralplains.com> 
>Cc: "ausnog at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net> 
>Sent: Sunday, 21 July 2013 2:48 AM
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] Simon Hackett's presentation from Comms Day yesterday - NBN fibre on copper prices
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>"NBNco have not started the whole cut copper and migrate over, just new installs.  So Simon's idea would cost shift money from NBNCo to the RSP, but make actually migrating people far more complex, time consuming and difficult for the 8million or so PSTN services still out there (plus/minus a few million, but still significant). I'd suggest it's a great idea for post-implementation, but for the upcoming phase, I actually think it's something that'll make the RSP/NBNCo effort much harder, more costly and more fraught with failure.
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>MMC (watching from afar)."
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>Taking MMC's points a little further, if you are rolling out an FttP network select GPON, then I can understand some of the technical (and security) reasons of why NBN may wish to "own" the ONU.  The risk of having potentially rogue devices on a GPON network could be problematic.
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>NBN Co. owning the ONU should help reduce the risk of unintended denial of service incidents due to faulty or incorrectly installed ONU (not necessarily help intentional denial of service attacks), eavesdropping, Man in the Middle (MITM) Attacks through forged OLT and ONU spoofing.  An excellent presentation summary highlighting the issues by Stanford University researchers can be found here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.85.5969&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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>In fact this matter and the Stanford University Research was highlighted in DBCDE's Implementation Study (page 206)  http://data.dbcde.gov.au/nbn/NBN-Implementation-Study-complete-report.pdf
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>"A 2007 Stanford University study outlines three potential security concerns: denial of service attacks; eavesdropping; and masquerading of an ONU (e.g. continuously transmitting upstream to block transmission of information from other ONTs). However, GPON vendors down play the significance of these risks. As GPON deployments become more widespread, standards and technology to ensure the security of these networks are likely to emerge." 
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>GPON is not as secure as people may think through unencrypted upstreams and I think even clear passwords, so my guess is that an NBN Co. Also one faulty ONU could take down the 31 other customers on the span.  ONU management is one way to try to manage this issue and without understanding their actual config, I'm guessing there is strong auth between the ONU and OLT.  Also there might be some DoS protection built in these days.  Again, it won't solve some of the security issues for those with intent to intercept/interfere but I'm sure it will help.
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This sort of risk has existed for a long time when there is active equipment on the customers' premises that is a critical component of providing the service. I remember hearing more than a decade ago that people (in the U.S. IIRC) were reflashing the firmware or settings in their cable modems to lift their service bandwidths above what they were paying for. This sort of problem has existed earlier than that with electricity and water networks, where meters measuring usage could be interfered with by customers. There are some interesting stories in the "Monitoring and Metering" chapter of this book:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html


I wouldn't be all that surprised if the NBN ONTs are running Linux, and I wouldn't be all that surprised if somebody works out how to pop them open and access both the JTAG/serial consoles of them (the amount of success in doing this sort of thing to ADSL and similar CPE, resulting in projects like OpenWRT, has made knowledge of the techniques on how to do it common and easily found). It'd be interesting to know if there are any or how many security measures are present in NBNco's ONUs to mitigate this risk (physical interference detection then destruction, signed software images, public key rather than shared key authentication to the network etc.?) Hopefully history has been learned from.


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>I think there is inherent risk, particularly in the early stages of deployment of trying to maintain a certain level of visibility/managability and consistency to end user deployments by letting providers connect whatever ONU they choose.  If the FttP deployment was EP2P then that would be a different story!
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Agree. The better model is one where all service parameters / security are implemented and enforced off of customers premises in a more secure physical facility, such as what occurs in ADSL. That doesn't mean active equipment can't be present at the customers premises, but it does prevent it from performing any service or security policy enforcement functions.


>  Anyway food for thought.

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>Cheers
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>[b]
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>PS:  Disclaimer that I could be a little outdated in GPON security, but this was the lay of the land as I understood it 3-4 years ago.
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