The Cisco Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) switch must be configured to authenticate all received MSDP packets.

Overview

Finding ID	Version	Rule ID	IA Controls	Severity
V-221065	CISC-RT-000910	SV-221065r856428_rule		Medium

Description

MSDP peering with customer network switches presents additional risks to the core, whether from a rogue or misconfigured MSDP-enabled switch. MSDP password authentication is used to validate each segment sent on the TCP connection between MSDP peers, protecting the MSDP session against the threat of spoofed packets being injected into the TCP connection stream.

STIG	Date
Cisco IOS XE Switch RTR Security Technical Implementation Guide	2025-05-20

Details

Check Text (C-22780r408989_chk)

Review the switch configuration to determine if received MSDP packets are authenticated.

ip msdp peer x.1.28.8 remote-as 8
ip msdp password peer x.1.28.8 xxxxxxxxxxxx

If the switch does not require MSDP authentication, this is a finding.

Fix Text (F-22769r408990_fix)

Configure the switch to authenticate MSDP messages as shown in the following example:

SW2(config)#ip msdp password peer x.1.28.8 xxxxxxxxxxxx