I would like to start our focus month with a simple post about what many consider the IPv6 killer feature: Addresses. There are a number of issues that come up with addresses, and you need to understand them when you deploy IPv6.

First of all, the IPv6 address is 128 Bits long. But unlike for IPv4, subnetting is a bit more restricted. The first 64 bits specify the network, while the second half of the address identify the host. Other then in a few, very specific cases (e.g. P2P links), you will never see a subnet smaller then a /64.

Here, I would like to focus on different ways to come up with the last 64 bits. There is a reason we have so many bits. The goal is to allow each host to configure itself without running into any conflicts. The simplest way to do this on ethernet is to derive the "interface id" from the MAC address. The mac address is only 48 bits, and it has to be unique for each host on the local network. As a result, we can just use these 48 bits as our interface ID. This works really nice, but has privacy implications: You will now pass your MAC address to each host you communicate with, and this part of the IP address will never change even if you move to a different network.

To respond to this we do have privacy enhanced temporary addresses. In this case, an address is picked randomly, and once a day the host will pick a new random interface ID. Chances of an overlap are pretty small and the host will check if the new address is already in use.

These methods don't require any infrastructure. A router will advertise the network part of the address, and the hosts will just "pick" the interface part using their prefered mechanism. But for us security people, the scary part is that there is no logging happening. We can't show who owned what address when. In particular the idea of temporary addresses is quite scarry for an enterprise network.

The solution, just like in IPv4, is DHCP. DHCPv6 can be used just like in IPv4 to assign addresses. However, if you try to achieve some kind of accountability, you have to make sure that these are the only addresses used. For example, you could use a firewall to restrict network access to allow only access from addresses within the valid DHCP range.

Of course, users could always manually configure an address within the range that is valid on your network, just like they could in IPv4. In IPv6, this is a bit easier as you have more addresses to pick from. You probably would like to have some form of passive system to monitor for new IPv6 addresses. However, in IPv6, you can not use ARP traffic. IPv6 replaces ARP with Neighbor Discovery (ND) and you need to find a tool that supports ND.

Here are a couple of guidelines:

- For an "unmanaged" network (home network, guest wifi), autoconfigured privacy enhanced addresses are probably what you want.

- For a "managed" network (business, enterprise...), you should still use DHCP or static configured addresses just like in IPv4.

- the basic attacks are still the same in IPv6, nothing really changed. IPv6 has an option called SEND to make ND and router advertisement more secure, but the protocol isn't implemented in any of the major OSs yet.

Vulnerabilities and Attacks:

The ND protocol is subject to many of the same attacks as ARP:

- ND spoofing to play MitM attacks

- Denial of service attacks by responding to all ND requests

- address spoofing

The "THC IPv6 Tool Suite" has implementations for many of these attacks. We will talk about this suite in a future "Focus Month" diary, as well as about scapy, probably the most powerful tool to create IPv6 traffic.

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Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D.

SANS Technology Institute

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