Configuring SSH for Cisco

In the CCNA level, we only know how to connect to Cisco devices using console connection and telnet connection.

We know that no one can tap on the console connection since it's directly connected to the Cisco device, but different story for the telnet connection.
Anyone can tap messages from the telnet session.

All messages send in clear text, so it's dangerous to leave default communication with Cisco devices just using telnet.

We can use SSH for secure connection to the Cisco devices. The SSH will encrypt all messages going from your computer to the Cisco devices.

First you're going to need Cisco IOS image that support SSH or IPSec, DES, or 3DES. How would you know that. Well you can just issue the following command:

router> ena
router# show ip ssh
% Invalid input detected at '^' marker.

If it's showing % Invalid input detected at '^' marker., then the IOS does not support SSH.

Now start with the configuration, you have to define a hostname for the Cisco device, and also the domain name for it.
In this example I use hostname of "netrouter" and domain name of "ciscolab.home".

router (config)# hostname netrouter
netrouter (config)# ip domain-name ciscolab.home

Next is to generate the rsa keypair used for the encryption, your device name plus the domain name will be the name of the key.
The modulus is the length of the key, the default value is 512 bits, Cisco recommends a length of 1024 bits.

netrouter (config)# crypto key generate rsa

The name for the keys will be: netrouter.ciscolab.home
Choose the size of the key modulus in the range of 360 to 2048
for your General Purpose Keys. Choosing a key modulus greater than
512 may take a few minutes.

How many bits in the modulus [512]: 1024
% Generating 1024 bit RSA keys ...[OK]

You can also configure some additional parameters for the SSH Connection:

netrouter (config)# ip ssh authentication-retries 5
netrouter (config)# ip ssh time-out 120
netrouter (config)# ip ssh version 2

The first command sets the number of retries if you failed or mistyped the username and password.
The second command sets the time out, the time required to enter the username and password in seconds.
The last command sets the version you want to use for the SSH.

Now we have generated keypair for the encryption, how will the Cisco device authenticates the users coming with SSH connection.
You can either use a AAA server like RADIUS or TACACS+ or you can just use the Cisco device local username and password. For now I'd just use local authentication, first set the username and password then configure the device to accept local authentication for the line vty connections.

netrouter (config)# username Cisco password homelab
netrouter (config)# line vty 0 4
netrouter (config-line)# login local

By now you have successfully configure SSH for Cisco, lets try the SSH, you can use putty for SSH connection, the default port for SSH is 22, you can use other port if you want by issuing ip ssh port 2000 from the global configuration mode.
Change the 2000 with other port ranging from 2000 to 10,000.

Here I'm using the default terminal from Macintosh:

Macintosh:~ krishananda$ ssh Cisco@192.168.1.1
Cisco@192.168.1.1's password:

netrouter>

There, the SSH is working. But the telnet session is also still working, now I want to restrict the Cisco device to only accept SSH connection and deny telnet connection.

WARNING!!!

Do not disconnect from your current connection especially if it's telnet session, in case you messed up with the configuration, you can always undo the changes.

netrouter (config)# line vty 0 4
netrouter (config-line)# transport input ssh

Now if I try to connect using telnet, the router will deny it:

Macintosh:~ krishananda$ telnet 192.168.1.1
Trying 192.168.1.1...
telnet: connect to address 192.168.1.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

Hope this is useful for you.

TIPS:

If you're using macintosh, and you change the rsa key by issuing crypto key generate rsa again on the same device,
Your mac will deny the SSH connection, telling you a warning about a man in the middle attack or the rsa key has changed.
All you need to do is open your text editor, open a file /users/yourname/.ssh/known_hosts
wipe out the content of known_hosts file and save.
That should do the trick.

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Configuring WPA and WPA2 on Cisco Aironet

The last post I talked about configuring WEP authentication on Cisco Aironet wireless access point.
Now I want to configure WPA and WPA2 to give more strength in the wireless security.

Just for a note I put an image of padlock on the last post and now I give a picture of a vault to give the image of stronger security.
You know what I mean, padlock versus vault, oh just forget it.

Back to the topic, when first posting about WEP I said that WEP encryption is weak, you better use encryption like WPA and WPA2.

WPA gives better key management and stronger cipher encryption. For those who don't know about cipher, it's kinda algorithm for encryption and decryption, we'll be configuring the cipher when dealing with WPA and WPA2. WPA uses what is called TKIP or Temporal Key Integrity Protocol for the cipher encryption.

WPA2 is even better than WPA, it uses a stronger encryption called AES or Advanced Encryption Standard, it creates fresh sessions key so every packet sent are encrypted with different key.

One other thing to know, the WPA and WPA2 come with two flavors, the Personal and Enterprise. In enterprise mode we need to have authentication server such as RADIUS, I don't have RADIUS server currently so I'll skip to the Personal mode instead.
The personal mode of WPA and WPA2 have what is called WPA-PSK the WPA Pre-Shared Key, we have to configure the WPA-PSK on both the Access Point and the clients.

So get on to the configuration of WPA first for my SSID Guest on VLAN 40:

1240AG> enable
1240AG# configure terminal
1240AG (config)# interface dot11radio 0
1240AG (config-if)# encryption vlan 40 mode ciphers tkip
1240AG (config-if)# ssid Guest
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# vlan 40
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# authentication open
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# authentication key-management wpa
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# wpa-psk ascii your-key-here

That's it you've successfully configured WPA on Cisco Aironet Wireless Access Point. Just configure the ciphers to tkip, set the authentication to open, use the wpa key management and the great thing in WPA is that we can set ascii characters as the key instead of hexadecimal like we did on configuring WEP.

The difference of WPA with WPA2 configurations is just some small things. We have to set the ciphers to AES and the key management to WPA version 2. Let's get started to configure WPA2 for my SSID Admin on VLAN 30:

1240AG> enable
1240AG# configure terminal
1240AG (config)# interface dot11radio 0
1240AG (config-if)# encryption vlan 30 mode ciphers aes-ccm
1240AG (config-if)# ssid Admin
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# vlan 30
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# authentication open
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# authentication key-management wpa version 2
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# wpa-psk ascii your-key-here

Don't forget to check out how to set up Wireless Network and the SSID on my last posts. Cheers.

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Configuring WEP Authentication on Cisco Aironet

The wireless network you installed for your LAN can mean that you are directly exposing your network to the public.

Anyone can use a wireless sniffer and view all the traffics going between the wireless access point and the clients. That's why you need to add security in your wireless LAN.

This post will talk about WEP or Wired Equivalent Privacy, the name states that your wireless network will be as safe as your wired network but not in reality.
There are many WEP decryption tools available out there. Just capture some packets using wireless sniffer and use the the decryption tool to find out the WEP key.

So we know the WEP is not secure, nevertheless I want to show how to configure WEP authentication for Cisco Aironet wireless access point.

WEP uses 40 bits encryption key (10 hexadecimal characters) or 128 bits (26 hexadecimal characters).
Don't get a false sense of security with the length of the encryption, the longer the encryption key just mean the more packets you need to capture and more time to decrypt them.

There are two types authentication for security according the IEEE 802.11 committee, the shared-key and open authentication.

In a shared-key authentication, the access point will send a challenge packet to the client and the client must encrypt the packet with with the right key (WEP key) then return it to the access point.
This method is not secure since everything sent in clear text.

The other method is open authentication, just like the name the authentication is open or you can say no authentication required.
But when open authentication used with the WEP, the WEP key will be used to encrypt all data before sending them.

I have to admit, I get a little confused when first time configuring authentication in Cisco Aironet wireless access points since no one thought me so I had to browse all the configuration examples.

It's easier to use the web interface of the access point, but I want to configure it through CLI.
To configure WEP authentication you should do this by entering the dot11radio interface:

1240AG> enable
1240AG# configure terminal
1240AG (config)# interface dot11radio 0

Create the SSID and associate it with VLAN if you haven't done it:

1240AG (config-if)# ssid Guest
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# vlan 40
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# authentication open
1240AG (config-if-ssid)# exit

Configure the WEP authentication:

1240AG (config-if)# encryption vlan 40 mode wep mandatory
1240AG (config-if)# encryption vlan 40 key 1 size 128bit 12345678901234567890123456 transmit-key

The above first command tell the Cisco Aironet to do WEP encryption on vlan 40 (SSID Guest) and set it as mandatory.
If you replace mandatory with optional, the use of WEP encryption depends on the client configuration, they can choose to encrypt the packets or not.

The second command tells the access point to use the WEP encryption key of 128 bit with the above 26 characters key. You can use whatever key you choose as long as it is hexadecimal characters (0-9 and A-F).

Don't forget to set up the access point as I did on the last post.

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The Danger of Broadcast Storm and the Solution

If you've taken the Cisco Academy program or been in the network world for a while, you must have heard about broadcast storm.

Broadcast storm is a state in a network where a frame broadcast in a switch environment is continually being flooded through the network.

This is mostly happen in a switch environment where you have redundant connection between switches, remember that routers segment or isolate broadcast between networks.

Redundant connections are important if you want to create a backup path between switches. If one path fails the other will take over.
This won't work out with switches that don't have any loop avoidance mechanism.

This is how a broadcast storm can happen, I have two switches connected with redundant links and one switch connected to a client and the other switch connected to a server.

Then the client sends a broadcast, say an Address Resolution Protocol or ARP to find out where the location of the server like this, pay attention to the red arrow, pretend that the arrow is a broadcast frame sent by the client.


Remember the rule of a switch, a switch forwards a broadcast frame to all ports except the port where it receives the request.

The Switch A receives the frame and forward it to the two links it has:


The broadcast frame received by the Switch B from two different ports and forward it again to other ports including the port where the Server is attached.

But it doesn't stop there, the frames are flooded again back to Switch A and back to the client.


From now on, back again to picture 2 then 3 and so on, this will keep going on forever until you shutdown the network.
This condition can also be called switch loop and it leads to broadcast storm.
Most likely you can find a question about this in the CCNA exam.

Luckily Cisco switches have loop avoidance mechanism called Spanning Tree Protocol or STP.

What STP does is eliminating loops in the network while allowing redundant links, the switches in the network will send out BPDU or Bridge Protocol Data Unit.

BPDU is like a boomerang send out to all ports in the switch. The BPDUs will travel all over the network and when the switch receive the BPDU it sent, then the switch knows that switch loop is occuring in the network and will block one of the ports where the loop occured.

Actually there's a set of session needed just to explain STP, there's even books specialized to explain STP considering that STP is very important in a redundant network.

STP eliminates redundant links in your network that's it, but if you don't carefully design your network even if you're using Cisco devices, your network will someday experience a melt down.

There's a great article about a network meltdown in a hospital related to STP that you can read here. In a hospital!! Man, that's serious business, we're talking about people lives here.
So the case study can be a valuable resource for you, just read it.

This happened to me once when I went on a client. They're just a small office kinda like SOHO, they're not using Cisco devices, they just using network devices from Linksys and D-Link.

So they called me and said for some reason the network went down.

After checking the network for a while, no problem with the configuration and the cabling but still no connectivity.
Then after tracing all the cables - it was not exactly a neat cabling they have there - I found that one cable was connected end to end to the same switch which created the broadcast storm.

So the moral of this story, it's very easy to take down an entire network with just a single network cable, especially if the networks are using average home usage network devices .

No need to say that it is very important to keep the physical security of your network devices. You can't trust the employees again nowadays.

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