The scenario I had in mind is Firewall A and Firewall B are in series and they're different products from two vendors. Firewall B is found to contain a vulnerab

The scenario I had in mind is Firewall A and Firewall B are in series and they're different products from two vendors. Firewall B is found to contain a vulnerability triggered by a specially crafted IPv6 TCP packet (that firewall A is happy to pass to firewall B), giving the attacker a level of control over Firewall B that allows them to then access the centralised authentication/authorisation system that would have otherwise been off limits to the attacker. The attacker communicates with firewall B using the same accepted protocol that firewall A and firewall B are configured to allow the attacker to access. Firewall B communicates to the authentication/authorisation system using the accepted protocol for doing so. Nothing suspicious appears to be going on unless you look at the patterns of traffic (throughput, duration of connections, number of connections in interval, etc) particularly to the authentication/authorisation system. I don't think in-band attacks on routers, switches, firewalls doing simple ACL checks are a risk worth spending much concern on because parsing IPv4/IPv6/TCP/UDP headers is not hard to securely implement. Riskier architecture would be intrusion detection systems that perform deep packet inspection in-band (e.g. not out-of-band via a beam splitter to a standalone IDS) where there is 1,000,000's of lines of potentially buggy code exposed to attackers. I agree with your point too that a complex network is harder to secure because you need more skill and expertise spread across more people. In such a scenario, it is easier for human mistakes to occur because of the difficulty in communicating, and difficulty in seeing the broader implication of what may appear to be a simple configuration change.