About the BRST - Border Router Security Tool

Some background on the BRST Open Source Project.

It began as a Master's Project for an Information Technology Degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The originator of the project, Ted LeRoy, was working as a Data Engineer and was, among other things, installing border routers for small and medium sized companies. They were mostly Nortel and Cisco devices. He noticed that Cisco routers are shipped in a relatively insecure state and that a lot of work was required to secure them and bring them in line with best practices such as those outlined in the National Securty Agency's System and Network Attack Center (NSA SNAC) Guide, Cisco's IOS Security Configuration Guide, or books like Thomas Akins' Securing Cisco Routers.

The is BRST focuses on border routers for small to medium sized companies because a border router usually sits outside the firewall so it is exposed to the world, and because administrators at small to medium sized companies may not have the Cisco skills to implement a secure configuration without some help or a lot of studying.

While tools like Cisco Auto Secure, and the Router Audit Tool (RAT) exist, they are not web based, and do not offer the administrator much flexibility in choosing services to enable or disable. We can thank Professor Pete Lutz for insisting that a GUI be used and for strongly encouraging an HTML interface. Web based means it works on any PC with a browser, it's accessible from anywhere, and it's an interface almost everyone is familiar with.

The goal of this project is to make a free, widely available utility that makes the job of securing Cisco border routers easier for all.