Tag Archives: IPv6 Security

IPv6 Site-to-Site VPN Recommendations

With global IPv6 routing, every single host has its own global unicast IPv6 address (GUA). No NAT anymore. No dirty tricks between hosts and routers. Great. Security is made merely by firewalls and policies. Site-to-site VPNs between partners can be build without address conflicts. Great again!

However, one problem to consider is the proper IPv6 routing via site-to-site VPNs since both sides now can reach each other even without a VPN. This was (mostly) not true with IPv4 in which both partners heavily relied on private RFC 1918 addresses that were not routable in the Internet. If specific IPv6 traffic should flow through a VPN but does actually traverse the Internet, it would be easy for a hacker to eavesdrop this traffic, leading to a security issue!

The following principles should be realized properly to assure that IPv6 traffic is never routed through the mere Internet when a site-to-site VPN tunnel is in place. Even in a failure of that tunnel. The principles can be applied to any IPv6 tunnels between partners, remote sites, home offices, etc., as long as the other site has its own global unicast IPv6 address space. (For VPNs in which a sub-prefix from the headquarters prefix is routed to a remote site, the situation behaves different. This article focuses on the routing between different IPv6 adress spaces.)

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Monitoring MAC-IPv6 Address Bindings

In the legacy IPv4 world, the DHCP server allocates IPv4 addresses and thereby stores the MAC addresses of the clients. In the IPv6 world, if SLAAC (autoconfiguration) is used, no network or security device per se stores the binding between the MAC (layer 2) and the IPv6 (layer 3) addresses from the clients. That is, a subsequent analysis of network behaviour corresponding to concrete IPv6 addresses and their client machines is not possible anymore. The mapping of “identity to IP” is not done automatically somewhere.

A simple way to overcome this issue is to install a service that captures Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) messages from all clients on the subnet in order to store the bindings of MAC and IPv6 addresses. This can be done with a small Tcpdump script on a dedicated Ethernet interface of a Linux host.

In this blog post I will present a use case for storing these bindings, the concept of the DAD messages, a Tcpdump script for doing this job, and the disadvantages and alternatives of this method.

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IPv6 Security – An Overview

I wrote a very small summary of my IPv6 Security master thesis which gives an introduction to several IPv6 security issues. People that are interested in IPv6 security are welcome to read this summary prior to study the whole master thesis. In this way, they will get an overview of IPv6 security issues before they are flooded with too many details. ;) I wrote this article for the RIPE Labs (published here), but since it gives a good overview about my thesis, I publish it here, too.

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IPv6 Man-in-the-Middle Attacken auf Schicht 2 (IPv6-Kongress 2013)

Hier gibt es meinen Vortrag vom IPv6-Kongress 2013 in Frankfurt zum Download.

Es ist eine PDF-Datei in der a) die Präsentationsfolien und b) eine Menge Kommentare von mir stehen, die quasi das Gesagte während des Vortrags ziemlich gut abdecken.

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Windows 7 IPv6 Neighbor Cache Bug?

Last year, I posted the following bug report on the IPv6 hackers mailing list, but nobody ever responded. I also sent it to Microsoft, but heart no response either. Since I am owning this blog since a few days, I will post it here, too:

Hello everybody,

I am testing with the THC-IPV6 Toolkit from van Hauser and noticed that Windows 7 adds and deletes several neighbor cache entries even on interfaces which are not connected. It further adds and deletes complete network interface cards from the neighbor cache. I would like to know if this is a feature or a bug.

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IPv6 Security Master Thesis

Hello world,

with this post I want to publish my own master thesis which I finished in February 2013 about the topic “IPv6 Security Test Laboratory”. (I studied the Master of IT-Security at the Ruhr-Uni Bochum.) I explained many IPv6 security issues in detail and tested three firewalls (Cisco ASA, Juniper SSG, Palo Alto PA) against all these IPv6 security attacks.

[UPDATE]Before reading the huge master thesis, this overview of IPv6 Security may be a good starting point for IPv6 security issues.[/UPDATE]

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