Ah, good ole Cisco. The company that security folks love to hate. I, on the other hand, am indifferent. I have worked with Cisco gear over the last decade+ and for routing and switching it does the trick nicely. Then that fateful day came when they found their shiny new jack boots in the front hall closet and descended on Las Vegas. They managed to leave a seriously negative aftertaste in the mouths of security researchers and hackers alike. Months later I had occasion to speak with an architect from Cisco and he offered, “We fucked up. I wish we as a company hadn’t done that.” But, the genie was out of the bottle.
The dust has settled and Cisco has learned from their mistakes. Well, at least from my perspective.
Michael Lynn was skewered by Cisco’s lawyers for his attempted presentation.
The presentation went on in a edited format. The crux of the conversation was the reverse engineering of Cisco’s IOS code which has historically been a closely guarded secret. Now, in an attempt to play in the virtual space they are opening up access to their code. Hmmm.
From Network World:
“It’s a significant step forward for us,” said Don Proctor, senior vice president of Cisco’s newly formed Software Group, at last week’s C-Scape 2007 analyst conference. “Software turns out to be a key way that we can do what [we’ve] been talking about for some time, which is link business architecture to technology architecture in a meaningful way.”
Cisco plans to “componentize” IOS – developing only one implementation of a specific function instead of several, depending on the image – dynamically link IOS services and move the software onto a Unix-based kernel. Cisco then plans to open up interfaces on IOS to allow third-party and customer-developed applications to access IOS services.
So, they have effectively made a turnabout in a manner of speaking. Now with this access to IOS I wonder how long until nefarious types gain a greater insight into the code? Oh right. With the writers on strike in Hollywood this is a rerun.
[tags]Cisco IOS, Cisoc IOS Access, IOS Code, Code[/tags]