What are the best practices for monitoring and auditing routing security?

1 Why monitor and audit routing security?

Monitoring and auditing routing security are two complementary activities that help you detect and prevent routing issues, such as misconfigurations, anomalies, errors, and attacks. Monitoring involves collecting and analyzing routing data, such as traffic flows, protocol messages, and performance metrics, to identify the current state and health of your network. Auditing involves verifying and validating routing data, such as policies, rules, and configurations, to ensure they comply with your network objectives and standards. By monitoring and auditing routing security, you can gain visibility, insight, and control over your network, and troubleshoot and resolve problems faster.

2 What to monitor and audit for routing security?

The scope and frequency of monitoring and auditing routing security depend on your network size, complexity, and requirements. Nonetheless, some common aspects to pay attention to include routing protocols, routing tables, routing policies, and routing events. For example, when monitoring protocols like OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, or RIP, you should check for protocol-specific parameters such as timers, neighbors, routes, and authentication. Routing tables should be checked for accuracy, completeness, and stability; while routing policies should be assessed for alignment, effectiveness, and efficiency. Lastly, routing events should be monitored for causes, impacts, and responses. Look out for any inconsistencies, errors, misbehaviors, invalid entries, conflicts, loopholes or violations that may arise.

3 How to monitor and audit routing security?

To monitor and audit routing security, you need to use the appropriate tools and techniques that suit your network environment and goals. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standard protocol that allows you to collect and manage routing data from different network devices, such as routers, switches, and firewalls. Syslog is another protocol that allows you to log and store routing data from different network devices and applications. NetFlow is a standard protocol that captures and exports routing data about the traffic flows that traverse your network devices. Finally, RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ) is a tool that allows you to monitor and audit the configuration changes of your network devices. All these tools and techniques can be used to query, receive information, send commands, log data, measure bandwidth usage, detect changes, backup configurations, and compare files in order to troubleshoot issues, audit performance, prevent potential routing issues, and improve routing security.

4 What are the benefits of monitoring and auditing routing security?

Monitoring and auditing routing security can bring many benefits to your network performance, reliability, and compliance. For example, it can help improve network availability and resilience by ensuring network devices and protocols are functioning properly and securely, as well as enhance security and protection by detecting and preventing unauthorized or malicious access to routing data. Additionally, it can increase network efficiency and optimization by optimizing routing policies, as well as ensure compliance and accountability by verifying that routing data complies with any external regulations.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?