T 5.51 Abuse of routing protocols

Routing protocols such as RIP (Routing Information Protocol) or OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) are used to forward changes in the routes between two networked systems to the systems involved and therefore to permit the routing tables to be changed dynamically. It is very easy to generate fake RIP packets and therefore easy to configure undesired routes.

The use of dynamic routing protocols enables sending of routing information to a computer, with this computer normally using this information to create its routing tables without any checks. An attacker may exploit this in order to change the transmission route in a targeted manner.