Cabletron Systems EMM-E6 New definitions for station and trunk ports, Secure address assignment

Security

When the LANVIEWSECURE feature is enabled, it provides two kinds of protection: intruder protection will prevent any unauthorized source addresses from communicating with the network via a secure port, and can be configured to secure both station and trunk ports; eavesdropper protection scrambles the data portion of any packet transmitted via a secure port to all but the destination port, and can be extended to broadcast and multicast packets as well as packets destined for a single address. Security is activated by enabling port locking; you can lock and unlock ports and enable or disable traps at the repeater-, module-, and port-level Security windows, as well as via the Source Address windows (see Chapter 6, Source Address, for more information).

When you lock ports from a repeater-, module,-, or port-level Security window, you have

TIP the option of setting two lock modes: Full or Continuous. When you lock ports via a Source Address window, the lock setting will default to the Full lock mode. See the section on Continuous Address Learning, below, or Enabling Security and Traps, page 7-12, for more information on these two lock modes.

LANVIEWSECURE includes the following features:

New definitions for station and trunk ports

Under LANVIEWSECURE, station ports are now defined as those detecting zero, one, or two source addresses; trunk ports are defined as those detecting three or more.

Secure address assignment

The first two source addresses detected on any port are automatically secured for both station and trunk ports; you can accept these default addresses as your secure addresses, or you can replace them. In addition, each board contains a floating cache that allows you to assign an additional 32 secure addresses among the ports of your choosing. Some boards even provide multiple caches; see Boards with Multiple Caches, below.

Trunk port security

When locking is enabled, all ports will be secured — including natural trunk ports. (Only ports which have been forced to trunk status will remain unlocked.) Before implementing locking on trunk ports, however, be sure you have secured the necessary source addresses; as with station ports, only the first two detected source addresses are secured by default.

For devices with the newest security firmware (3.11.xx), a port’s topology status

—whether it is considered to be a station port or a trunk port — no longer determines its securability; securability is only determined by the number of source addresses in a port’s source address table: any port which detects fewer than 35 source addresses will be locked. Ports which exceed those numbers are designated “unsecurable,” and will be displayed as such in the port-level Security window; in addition, a new feature allows you to force any port to an unsecurable (that is, unlockable) state.

What is LANVIEWsecure? 7-3