Attacks on the data plane and how to defend against them
As we saw earlier, the data plane is the part of the networking device that's responsible for the transfer of data through the device, and therefore attacks on the data plane are those targeting processes and services that are responsible for data transfer. Data plane services are services such as ICMP, ARP, and Reverse ARP (RARP), among others. We will go through these services and see how to protect the data plane while using them.
Protection against heavy traffic through an interface
Heavy traffic can cross a networking device interface—that's the purpose of it. The thing is to know when it happens and check if it is legitimate traffic. For this purpose, there are two things we can configure, as follows:
- Traffic threshold
- Storm control
Configuring a threshold: 80-90% of the interface bandwidth should be a reasonable value. For example, for Cisco, refer to https://www.cisco.com/c/en...
