When routers go bad [LWN.net]

When routers go bad

Posted May 24, 2007 10:22 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033)
Parent article: When routers go bad

Routers should have hardware write-protect switches on their front panels. (Probably two, one for the code and one for the configuration, which should be in two separate chips or subsystems). If they did, at least one could guarantee that power-cycling the router would restore it to its last-written state.

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Hardware write-protect switch

Posted May 24, 2007 14:04 UTC (Thu) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I'm not sure how this helps very much. If there is a vulnerable firmware,
a compromised system is quite likely that it will get compromised in
exactly the same way after a reboot.

This is akin to what used to be conventional wisdom (maybe it still is):
if your system is compromised take it off the network and immediately
re-install the OS. But this removes all evidence of what went wrong to get
you exploited, as well as what the intruder did on your system and the
rest of your network.