OPSEC E. Vyncke, Ed.
Internet-Draft Cisco
Intended status: Informational K. Chittimaneni
Expires: May 3, 2018 Dropbox Inc.
M. Kaeo
Double Shot Security
October 30, 2017

Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks
draft-ietf-opsec-v6-12

Abstract

Knowledge and experience on how to operate IPv4 securely is available: whether it is the Internet or an enterprise internal network. However, IPv6 presents some new security challenges. RFC 4942 describes the security issues in the protocol but network managers also need a more practical, operations-minded document to enumerate advantages and/or disadvantages of certain choices.

This document analyzes the operational security issues in all places of a network (enterprises, service providers and residential users) and proposes technical and procedural mitigations techniques.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on May 3, 2018.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.


Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Running an IPv6 network is new for most operators not only because they are not yet used to large scale IPv6 networks but also because there are subtle differences between IPv4 and IPv6 especially with respect to security. For example, all layer-2 interactions are now done using Neighbor Discovery Protocol [RFC4861] rather than using Address Resolution Protocol [RFC0826]. Also, there are subtle differences between NAT44 [RFC2993] and NPTv6 [RFC6296] which are explicitly pointed out in the latter's security considerations section.

IPv6 networks are deployed using a variety of techniques, each of which have their own specific security concerns.

This document complements [RFC4942] by listing all security issues when operating a network utilizing varying transition technologies and updating with ones that have been standardized since 2007. It also provides more recent operational deployment experiences where warranted.

1.1. Requirements Language

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119] when they appear in ALL CAPS. These words may also appear in this document in lower case as plain English words, absent their normative meanings.

2. Generic Security Considerations

2.1. Addressing Architecture

IPv6 address allocations and overall architecture are an important part of securing IPv6. Initial designs, even if intended to be temporary, tend to last much longer than expected. Although initially IPv6 was thought to make renumbering easy, in practice, it may be extremely difficult to renumber without a good IP Addresses Management (IPAM) system.

Once an address allocation has been assigned, there should be some thought given to an overall address allocation plan. With the abundance of address space available, an address allocation may be structured around services along with geographic locations, which then can be a basis for more structured security policies to permit or deny services between geographic regions.

A common question is whether companies should use PI vs PA space [RFC7381], but from a security perspective there is little difference. However, one aspect to keep in mind is who has administrative ownership of the address space and who is technically responsible if/when there is a need to enforce restrictions on routability of the space due to malicious criminal activity. Using PA space exposes the organization to a renumbering of the complete network including security policies (based on ACL), audit system, ... in short a complex task which could lead to some security risk if done for a large network and without automation; hence, for large network, PI space should be preferred.

2.1.1. Statically Configured Addresses

When considering how to assign statically configured addresses it is necessary to take into consideration the effectiveness of perimeter security in a given environment. There is a trade-off between ease of operation (where some portions of the IPv6 address could be easily recognizable for operational debugging and troubleshooting) versus the risk of trivial scanning used for reconnaissance. [SCANNING] shows that there are scientifically based mechanisms that make scanning for IPv6 reachable nodes more realizable than expected; see also [RFC7707]. The use of common multicast groups which are defined for important networked devices and the use of commonly repeated addresses could make it easy to figure out which devices are name servers, routers or other critical devices; even a simple traceroute will expose most of the routers on a path. There are many scanning techniques and more to come possible, hence, operators should never relly on the 'impossible to find because my address is random' paradigm.

While in some environments the security is so poor that obfuscating addresses could be considered a benefit; it is a better practice to ensure that perimeter rules are actively checked and enforced and that statically configured addresses follow some logical allocation scheme for ease of operation (as simplicity always helps security).

2.1.2. Use of ULAs

It is important to carefully weigh the benefits of using ULAs versus utilizing a section of the global allocation and creating a more effective filtering strategy. It is also important to note that the IETF does not recommend the use of ULA and NPTv6.

ULAs are intended for scenarios where IP addresses will not have global scope so they should not appear in the global BGP routing table. The implicit expectation from the RFC is that all ULAs will be randomly created as /48s. Any use of ULAs that are not created as a /48 violates RFC4193.

ULAs could be useful for infrastructure hiding as described in RFC4864. Alternatively Link-Local addresses RFC7404 could also be used. Although ULAs are supposed to be used in conjunction with global addresses for hosts that desire external connectivity, a few operators chose to use ULAs in conjunction with some sort of address translation at the border in order to maintain a perception of parity between their IPv4 and IPv6 setup. Some operators believe that stateful IPv6 Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT) provides some security not provided by NPTv6 (the authors of this document do not share this point of view). The use of stateful IPv6 NAPT would be problematic in trying to track specific machines that may source malware although this is less of an issue if appropriate logging is done which includes utilizing accurate timestamps and logging a node's source ports RFC6302. Another typical argument in favor of ULA is that there are too many mistakes made with ACL filters at the edge and the use of ULAs could make things easier to set filters.

The use of ULA does not isolate 'by magic' the part of the network using ULA from other parts of the network (including the Internet). Although section 4.1 of RFC4193 explicitly states "If BGP is being used at the site border with an ISP, the default BGP configuration must filter out any Local IPv6 address prefixes, both incoming and outgoing.", the operational reality is that this guideline is not always followed. As written, RFC4193 makes no changes to default routing behavior of exterior protocols. Therefore, routers will happily forward packets whose source or destination address is ULA as long as they have a route to the destination and there is no ACL blocking those packets. This means that using ULA does not prevent route and packet filters having to be implemented and monitored. This also means that all Internet transit networks should consider ULA as source or destination as bogons packets and drop them.

2.1.3. Point-to-Point Links

RFC6164 recommends the use of /127 for inter-router point-to-point links. A /127 prevents the ping-pong attack between routers. However, it should be noted that at the time of this writing, there are still many networks out there that follow the advice provided by RFC3627 (obsoleted and marked Historic by RFC6547) and therefore continue to use /64's and/or /112's. We recommend that the guidance provided by RFC6164 be followed.

Some environments are also using link-local addressing for point-to-point links. While this practice could further reduce the attack surface against infrastructure devices, the operational disadvantages need also to be carefully considered RFC7404.

2.1.4. Temporary Addresses - Privacy Extensions for SLAAC

Normal stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) relies on the automatically generated EUI-64 address, which together with the /64 prefix makes up the global unique IPv6 address. The EUI-64 address is generated from the MAC address. Randomly generating an interface ID, as described in [RFC4941], is part of SLAAC with so-called privacy extension addresses and used to address some privacy concerns. Privacy extension addresses a.k.a. temporary addresses may help to mitigate the correlation of activities of a node within the same network, and may also reduce the attack exposure window.

As privacy extension addresses could also be used to obfuscate some malevolent activities (whether on purpose or not), it is advised in scenarios where user attribution is important to rely on a layer-2 authentication mechanism such as IEEE 802.1X with the appropriate RADIUS accounting or to disable SLAAC and rely only on DHCPv6. However, in scenarios where anonymity is a strong desire (protecting user privacy is more important than user attribution), privacy extension addresses should be used. When [RFC8064] is available, the stable temporary address are probably a good balance between privacy (among multiple networks) and security/user attribution (within a network).

Using privacy extension addresses prevents the operator from building a priori host specific access control lists (ACLs). It must be noted that recent versions of Windows do not use the MAC address anymore to build the stable address but use a mechanism similar to the one described in [RFC7217], this also means that such an ACL cannot be configured based solely on the MAC address of the nodes, diminishing the value of such ACL. On the other hand, different VLANs are often used to segregate users, in this case ACL can rely on a /64 prefix per VLAN rather than a per host ACL entry.

The decision to utilize privacy extension addresses can come down to whether the network is managed versus unmanaged. In some environments full visibility into the network is required at all times which requires that all traffic be attributable to where it is sourced or where it is destined to within a specific network. This situation is dependent on what level of logging is performed. If logging considerations include utilizing accurate timestamps and logging a node's source ports [RFC6302] then there should always exist appropriate user attribution needed to get to the source of any malware originator or source of criminal activity.

Disabling SLAAC and privacy extensions addresses can be done for normal users by sending Router Advertisement with a hint to get addresses via DHCPv6 by setting the M-bit but also disabling SLAAC by resetting all A-bits in all prefix information options sent in the Router Advertisement message. Hackers will find a way to bypass this mechanism if not enforced at the swicth/router level by snooping the DHCPv6 exchanges and enforcing the mapping between the switch/router port, the MAC address and the leased IPv6 address.

2.1.5. Privacy consideration of Addresses

However, there are several privacy issues still present with [RFC4941] such as host tracking, and address scanning attacks are still possible. More details are provided in Appendix A. of [RFC7217] and in [RFC7721].

2.1.6. DHCP/DNS Considerations

Many environments use DHCPv6 to allocate addresses to ensure audit-ability and traceability (but see Section 2.6.1.5). A main security concern is the ability to detect and counteract against rogue DHCP servers (Section 2.3.1).

DNS is often used for malware activities and while there are no fundamental differences with IPv4 and IPv6 security concerns, there are specific consideration in DNS64 RFC6147 environments that need to be understood. Specifically the interactions and potential to interference with DNSsec implementation need to be understood - these are pointed out in detail in Section 2.7.3.2.

2.1.7. Using a /64 per host

An interesting approach is using a /64 per host as proposed in [I-D.ietf-v6ops-unique-ipv6-prefix-per-host]. This allows an easier user attribution (typically based on the host MAC address) as its /64 prefix is stable even if applications, containers within the host can change of IPv6 address within this /64.

2.2. Extension Headers

The extension headers are one of the most critical differentiator between IPv4 and IPv6. They have also become a very controversial topic since forwarding nodes that discard packets containing extension headers are known to cause connectivity failures and deployment problems. Understanding the role of varying extension headers is important and this section enumerates the ones that need careful consideration. The IANA has closed the existing empty "Next Header Types" registry to new entries and is redirecting its users to a new "IPv6 Extension Header Types" registry.

A clarification on how intermediate nodes should handle existing packets with extension headers and any extension headers that are defined in the future is found in RFC7045. The uniform TLV format to be used for defining future extension headers is described in RFC6564. Some observations listed in RFC7872 seems to indicate that packets with certain extension headers may not traverse the Internet to its intended destination based on operator policies.

It must also be noted that there is no indication in the packet whether the Next Protocol field points to an extension header or to a transport header. This may confuse some filtering rules.

2.2.1. Order and Repetition of Extension Headers

While RFC2460RFC2460 defines the order and the maximum repetition of extension headers, there are still IPv6 implementations at the time of writing this document which support a wrong order of headers (such as ESP before routing) or an illegal repetition of headers (such as multiple routing headers). The same applies for options contained in the extension headers (see [I-D.kampanakis-6man-ipv6-eh-parsing]). In some cases, it has lead to nodes crashing when receiving or forwarding wrongly formated packets.

2.2.2. Hop-by-Hop Extension Header

The hop-by-hop extension header, when present in an IPv6 packet, forces all nodes in the path to inspect this header. This is of course a large avenue for a denial of service as most if not all routers cannot process this kind of packets in hardware but have to 'punt' this packet for software processing. See also [I-D.ietf-6man-hbh-header-handling].

2.2.3. Fragmentation Extension Header

The fragmentation extension header is used by the source when it has to fragment packets. RFC7112 explains why it is important to:

Else, stateless filtering could be bypassed by an hostile party. RFC6980 applies the same rule to NDP and the RA-guard function.

2.2.4. IP Security Extension Header

The IPsec [RFC4301] extension headers (AH and ESP) are required if IPsec is to be utilized for network level security functionality.

2.3. Link-Layer Security

IPv6 relies heavily on the Neighbor Discovery protocol (NDP) RFC4861 to perform a variety of link operations such as discovering other nodes on the link, resolving their link-layer addresses, and finding routers on the link. If not secured, NDP is vulnerable to various attacks such as router/neighbor message spoofing, redirect attacks, Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) DoS attacks, etc. many of these security threats to NDP have been documented in IPv6 ND Trust Models and Threats RFC3756 and in RFC6583.

2.3.1. Securing DHCP

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6), as detailed in RFC3315, enables DHCP servers to pass configuration parameters such as IPv6 network addresses and other configuration information to IPv6 nodes. DHCP plays an important role in any large network by providing robust stateful configuration and autoregistration of DNS Host Names.

The two most common threats to DHCP clients come from malicious (a.k.a. rogue) or unintentionally misconfigured DHCP servers. A malicious DHCP server is established with the intent of providing incorrect configuration information to the client to cause a denial of service attack or mount a man in the middle attack. While unintentionall, a misconfigured DHCP server can have the same impact. Additional threats against DHCP are discussed in the security considerations section of RFC3315DHCP-shield.

RFC7610 specifies a mechanism for protecting connected DHCPv6 clients against rogue DHCPv6 servers. This mechanism is based on DHCPv6 packet-filtering at the layer-2 device; the administrator specifies the interfaces connected to DHCPv6 servers.

It is recommended to use DHCP-shield and to analyze the log generated by this security feature.

2.3.2. ND/RA Rate Limiting

Neighbor Discovery (ND) can be vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks in which a router is forced to perform address resolution for a large number of unassigned addresses. Possible side effects of this attack preclude new devices from joining the network or even worse rendering the last hop router ineffective due to high CPU usage. Easy mitigative steps include rate limiting Neighbor Solicitations, restricting the amount of state reserved for unresolved solicitations, and clever cache/timer management.

RFC6583 discusses the potential for DoS in detail and suggests implementation improvements and operational mitigation techniques that may be used to mitigate or alleviate the impact of such attacks. Here are some feasible mitigation options that can be employed by network operators today:

Additionally, IPv6 ND uses multicast extensively for signaling messages on the local link to avoid broadcast messages for on-the-wire efficiency. However, this has some side effects on wifi networks, especially a negative impact on battery life of smartphones and other battery operated devices that are connected to such networks. The following drafts are actively discussing methods to rate limit RAs and other ND messages on wifi networks in order to address this issue:

2.3.3. ND/RA Filtering

Router Advertisement spoofing is a well-known attack vector and has been extensively documented. The presence of rogue RAs, either intentional or malicious, can cause partial or complete failure of operation of hosts on an IPv6 link. For example, a host can select an incorrect router address which can be used as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack or can assume wrong prefixes to be used for stateless address configuration (SLAAC). RFC6104 summarizes the scenarios in which rogue RAs may be observed and presents a list of possible solutions to the problem. RFC6105 (RA-Guard) describes a solution framework for the rogue RA problem where network segments are designed around switching devices that are capable of identifying invalid RAs and blocking them before the attack packets actually reach the target nodes.

However, several evasion techniques that circumvent the protection provided by RA-Guard have surfaced. A key challenge to this mitigation technique is introduced by IPv6 fragmentation. An attacker can conceal the attack by fragmenting his packets into multiple fragments such that the switching device that is responsible for blocking invalid RAs cannot find all the necessary information to perform packet filtering in the same packet. RFC7113 describes such evasion techniques, and provides advice to RA-Guard implementers such that the aforementioned evasion vectors can be eliminated.

Given that the IPv6 Fragmentation Header can be leveraged to circumvent current implementations of RA-Guard, RFC6980 updates RFC4861 such that use of the IPv6 Fragmentation Header is forbidden in all Neighbor Discovery messages except "Certification Path Advertisement", thus allowing for simple and effective measures to counter Neighbor Discovery attacks.

The Source Address Validation Improvements (SAVI) working group has worked on other ways to mitigate the effects of such attacks. RFC7513 would help in creating bindings between a DHCPv4 RFC2131 /DHCPv6 RFC3315 assigned source IP address and a binding anchor RFC7039 on a SAVI device. Also, RFC6620 describes how to glean similar bindings when DHCP is not used. The bindings can be used to filter packets generated on the local link with forged source IP address.

It is still recommended that RA-Guard be be employed as a first line of defense against common attack vectors including misconfigured hosts. The generated log should also be analyzed to act on violations.

2.3.4. 3GPP Link-Layer Security

The 3GPP link is a point-to-point like link that has no link-layer address. This implies there can only be an end host (the mobile hand-set) and the first-hop router (i.e., a GPRS Gateway Support Node (GGSN) or a Packet Gateway (PGW)) on that link. The GGSN/PGW never configures a non link-local address on the link using the advertised /64 prefix on it. The advertised prefix must not be used for on-link determination. There is no need for an address resolution on the 3GPP link, since there are no link-layer addresses. Furthermore, the GGSN/PGW assigns a prefix that is unique within each 3GPP link that uses IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration. This avoids the necessity to perform DAD at the network level for every address built by the mobile host. The GGSN/PGW always provides an IID to the cellular host for the purpose of configuring the link-local address and ensures the uniqueness of the IID on the link (i.e., no collisions between its own link-local address and the mobile host's one).

The 3GPP link model itself mitigates most of the known NDP-related Denial-of-Service attacks. In practice, the GGSN/PGW only needs to route all traffic to the mobile host that falls under the prefix assigned to it. As there is also a single host on the 3GPP link, there is no need to defend that IPv6 address.

See Section 5 of RFC6459 for a more detailed discussion on the 3GPP link model, NDP on it and the address configuration detail.

2.3.5. SeND and CGA

SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SeND), as described in RFC3971, is a mechanism that was designed to secure ND messages. This approach involves the use of new NDP options to carry public key based signatures. Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA), as described in RFC3972, are used to ensure that the sender of a Neighbor Discovery message is the actual "owner" of the claimed IPv6 address. A new NDP option, the CGA option, was introduced and is used to carry the public key and associated parameters. Another NDP option, the RSA Signature option, is used to protect all messages relating to neighbor and Router discovery.

SeND protects against:

SeND does NOT:

However, at this time and after many years after their specifications, CGA and SeND do not have wide support from generic operating systems; hence, their usefulness is limited.

2.4. Control Plane Security

RFC6192 defines the router control plane. This definition is repeated here for the reader's convenience.

Modern router architecture design maintains a strict separation of forwarding and router control plane hardware and software. The router control plane supports routing and management functions. It is generally described as the router architecture hardware and software components for handling packets destined to the device itself as well as building and sending packets originated locally on the device. The forwarding plane is typically described as the router architecture hardware and software components responsible for receiving a packet on an incoming interface, performing a lookup to identify the packet's IP next hop and determine the best outgoing interface towards the destination, and forwarding the packet out through the appropriate outgoing interface.

While the forwarding plane is usually implemented in high-speed hardware, the control plane is implemented by a generic processor (named router processor RP) and cannot process packets at a high rate. Hence, this processor can be attacked by flooding its input queue with more packets than it can process. The control plane processor is then unable to process valid control packets and the router can lose OSPF or BGP adjacencies which can cause a severe network disruption.

The mitigation technique is:

This section will consider several classes of control packets:

2.4.1. Control Protocols

This class includes OSPFv3, BGP, NDP, ICMP.

An ingress ACL to be applied on all the router interfaces SHOULD be configured such as:

Note: dropping OSPFv3 packets which are authenticated by IPsec could be impossible on some routers whose ACL are unable to parse the IPsec ESP or AH extension headers.

Rate limiting of the valid packets SHOULD be done. The exact configuration obviously depends on the power of the Route Processor.

2.4.2. Management Protocols

This class includes: SSH, SNMP, syslog, NTP, etc

An ingress ACL to be applied on all the router interfaces SHOULD be configured such as:

Rate limiting of the valid packets SHOULD be done. The exact configuration obviously depends on the power of the Route Processor.

2.4.3. Packet Exceptions

This class covers multiple cases where a data plane packet is punted to the route processor because it requires specific processing:

On some routers, not everything can be done by the specialized data plane hardware which requires some packets to be 'punted' to the generic RP. This could include for example the processing of a long extension header chain in order to apply an ACL based on layer 4 information. RFC6980 and more generally RFC7112 highlights the security implications of oversized extension header chains on routers and updates RFC2460 such that the first fragment of a packet is required to contain the entire IPv6 header chain.

An ingress ACL cannot help to mitigate a control plane attack using those packet exceptions. The only protection for the RP is to limit the rate of those packet exceptions forwarded to the RP, this means that some data plane packets will be dropped without any ICMP messages back to the source which will cause Path MTU holes. But, there is no other solution.

In addition to limiting the rate of data plane packets queued to the RP, it is also important to limit the generation rate of ICMP messages both the save the RP but also to prevent an amplification attack using the router as a reflector.

2.5. Routing Security

Routing security in general can be broadly divided into three sections:

  1. Authenticating neighbors/peers
  2. Securing routing updates between peers
  3. Route filtering

[RFC7454] covers these sections specifically for BGP in detail.

2.5.1. Authenticating Neighbors/Peers

A basic element of routing is the process of forming adjacencies, neighbor, or peering relationships with other routers. From a security perspective, it is very important to establish such relationships only with routers and/or administrative domains that one trusts. A traditional approach has been to use MD5 HMAC, which allows routers to authenticate each other prior to establishing a routing relationship.

OSPFv3 can rely on IPsec to fulfill the authentication function. However, it should be noted that IPsec support is not standard on all routing platforms. In some cases, this requires specialized hardware that offloads crypto over to dedicated ASICs or enhanced software images (both of which often come with added financial cost) to provide such functionality. An added detail is to determine whether OSPFv3 IPsec implementations use AH or ESP-Null for integrity protection. In early implementations all OSPFv3 IPsec configurations relied on AH since the details weren't specified in RFC5340 or RFC2740 that was obsoleted by the former. However, the document which specifically describes how IPsec should be implemented for OSPFv3 RFC4552 specifically states that ESP-Null MUST and AH MAY be implemented since it follows the overall IPsec standards wordings. OSPFv3 can also use normal ESP to encrypt the OSPFv3 payload to hide the routing information.

RFC7166 (which obsoletes RFC6506 changes OSPFv3's reliance on IPsec by appending an authentication trailer to the end of the OSPFv3 packets. This document does not specifically provide for a mechanism that will authenticate the specific originator of a packet. Rather, it will allow a router to confirm that the packet has indeed been issued by a router that had access to the shared authentication key.

With all authentication mechanisms, operators should confirm that implementations can support re-keying mechanisms that do not cause outages. There have been instances where any re-keying cause outages and therefore the tradeoff between utilizing this functionality needs to be weighed against the protection it provides.

2.5.2. Securing Routing Updates Between Peers

IPv6 initially mandated the provisioning of IPsec capability in all nodes. However, in the updated IPv6 Nodes Requirement standard RFC6434 is now a SHOULD and not MUST implement. Theoretically it is possible, and recommended, that communication between two IPv6 nodes, including routers exchanging routing information be encrypted using IPsec. In practice however, deploying IPsec is not always feasible given hardware and software limitations of various platforms deployed, as described in the earlier section. Additionally, in a protocol such as OSPFv3 where adjacencies are formed on a one-to-many basis, IPsec key management becomes difficult to maintain and is not often utilized.

2.5.3. Route Filtering

Route filtering policies will be different depending on whether they pertain to edge route filtering vs internal route filtering. At a minimum, IPv6 routing policy as it pertains to routing between different administrative domains should aim to maintain parity with IPv4 from a policy perspective e.g.,

Some good recommendations for filtering can be found from Team CYMRU at [CYMRU].

2.6. Logging/Monitoring

In order to perform forensic research in case of any security incident or to detect abnormal behaviors, network operators should log multiple pieces of information.

This includes:

Please note that there are privacy issues related to how those logs are collected, kept and safely discarded. Operators are urged to check their country legislation.

All those pieces of information will be used for:

2.6.1. Data Sources

This section lists the most important sources of data that are useful for operational security.

2.6.1.1. Logs of Applications

Those logs are usually text files where the remote IPv6 address is stored in all characters (not binary). This can complicate the processing since one IPv6 address, 2001:db8::1 can be written in multiple ways such as:

RFC 5952 explains this problem in detail and recommends the use of a single canonical format (in short use lower case and suppress leading 0). This memo recommends the use of canonical format for IPv6 addresses in all possible cases. If the existing application cannot log under the canonical format, then this memo recommends the use an external program in order to canonicalize all IPv6 addresses.

For example, this perl script can be used:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use Socket ;
use Socket6 ;

my (@words, $word, $binary_address) ; 
    
## go through the file one line at a time
while (my $line = <STDIN>) {
  chomp $line;
  foreach my $word (split /[\s+]/, $line) {
    $binary_address = inet_pton AF_INET6, $word ;
    if ($binary_address) {
      print inet_ntop AF_INET6, $binary_address ;
    } else {
      print $word ;
    }
    print " " ;
  }
  print "\n" ;
}

2.6.1.2. IP Flow Information Export by IPv6 Routers

IPfix defines some data elements that are useful for security:

Moreover, IPfix is very efficient in terms of data handling and transport. It can also aggregate flows by a key such as sourceMacAddress in order to have aggregated data associated with a specific sourceMacAddress. This memo recommends the use of IPfix and aggregation on nextHeaderIPv6, sourceIPv6Address and sourceMacAddress.

2.6.1.3. SNMP MIB by IPv6 Routers

RFC 4293 defines a Management Information Base (MIB) for the two address families of IP. This memo recommends the use of:

2.6.1.4. Neighbor Cache of IPv6 Routers

The neighbor cache of routers contains all mappings between IPv6 addresses and data-link layer addresses. It is usually available by two means:

The neighbor cache is highly dynamic as mappings are added when a new IPv6 address appears on the network (could be quite often with privacy extension addresses or when they are removed when the state goes from UNREACH to removed (the default time for a removal per Neighbor Unreachability Detection algorithm is 38 seconds for a typical host such as Windows 7). This means that the content of the neighbor cache must periodically be fetched every 30 seconds (to be on the safe side) and stored for later use.

This is an important source of information because it is trivial (on a switch not using the SAVI algorithm) to defeat the mapping between data-link layer address and IPv6 address. Let us rephrase the previous statement: having access to the current and past content of the neighbor cache has a paramount value for forensic and audit trail.

Using the approach of one /64 per host (Section 2.1.7) replaces the neighbor cache dumps by a mere caching of the allocated /64 prefix when combined with strict enforcement rule on the router and switches to prevent IPv6 spoofing.

2.6.1.5. Stateful DHCPv6 Lease

In some networks, IPv6 addresses are managed by stateful DHCPv6 server that leases IPv6 addresses to clients. It is indeed quite similar to DHCP for IPv4 so it can be tempting to use this DHCP lease file to discover the mapping between IPv6 addresses and data-link layer addresses as it was usually done in the IPv4 era.

It is not so easy in the IPv6 era because not all nodes will use DHCPv6 (there are nodes which can only do stateless autoconfiguration) but also because DHCPv6 clients are identified not by their hardware-client address as in IPv4 but by a DHCP Unique ID (DUID) which can have several formats: some being the data-link layer address, some being data-link layer address prepended with time information or even an opaque number which is useless for operation security. Moreover, when the DUID is based on the data-link address, this address can be of any interface of the client (such as the wireless interface while the client actually uses its wired interface to connect to the network).

If a lightweight DHCP relay agent is used in the layer-2 switches, then the DHCP server also receives the Interface-ID information which could be save in order to identifity the interface of the switches which received a specific leased IPv6 address. Also, if a relay agent adds the data-link layer address in the option for Relay Agent Remote-ID, then the DHCPv6 server can keep track of the data-link and leased IPv6 addresses.

In short, the DHCPv6 lease file is less interesting than in the IPv4 era. DHCPv6 servers that keeps the relayed data-link layer address in addition to the DUID in the lease file do not suffer from this limitation. On a managed network where all hosts support DHCPv6, special care must be taken to prevent stateless autoconfiguration anyway (and if applicable) by sending RA with all announced prefixes without the A-bit set.

The mapping between data-link layer address and the IPv6 address can be secured by using switches implementing the SAVI algorithms. Of course, this also requires that data-link layer address is protected by using layer-2 mechanism such as [IEEE-802.1X].

2.6.1.6. RADIUS Accounting Log

For interfaces where the user is authenticated via a RADIUS server, and if RADIUS accounting is enabled, then the RADIUS server receives accounting Acct-Status-Type records at the start and at the end of the connection which include all IPv6 (and IPv4) addresses used by the user. This technique can be used notably for Wi-Fi networks with Wi-Fi Protected Address (WPA) or any other IEEE 802.1Xwired interface on an Ethernet switch.

2.6.1.7. Other Data Sources

There are other data sources that must be kept exactly as in the IPv4 network:

2.6.2. Use of Collected Data

This section leverages the data collected as described before in order to achieve several security benefits.

2.6.2.1. Forensic

The forensic use case is when the network operator must locate an IPv6 address that was present in the network at a certain time or is still currently in the network.

The source of information can be, in decreasing order, neighbor cache, DHCP lease file. Then, the procedure is:

  1. based on the IPv6 prefix of the IPv6 address find the router(s) which are used to reach this prefix;
  2. based on this limited set of routers, on the incident time and on IPv6 address to retrieve the data-link address from live neighbor cache, from the historical data of the neighbor cache, or from the DHCP lease file;
  3. based on the data-link layer address, look-up on which switch interface was this data-link layer address. In the case of wireless LAN, the RADIUS log should have the mapping between user identification and the MAC address.

At the end of the process, the interface the host originating malicious activity or the username which was abused for malicious activity has been determined.

2.6.2.2. Inventory

RFC 7707 (which obsoletes RFC 5157) is about the difficulties to scan an IPv6 network due to the vast number of IPv6 addresses per link. This has the side effect of making the inventory task difficult in an IPv6 network while it was trivial to do in an IPv4 network (a simple enumeration of all IPv4 addresses, followed by a ping and a TCP/UDP port scan). Getting an inventory of all connected devices is of prime importance for a secure operation of a network.

There are many ways to do an inventory of an IPv6 network.

The first technique is to use the IPfix information and extract the list of all IPv6 source addresses to find all IPv6 nodes that sent packets through a router. This is very efficient but alas will not discover silent node that never transmitted such packets... Also, it must be noted that link-local addresses will never be discovered by this means.

The second way is again to use the collected neighbor cache content to find all IPv6 addresses in the cache. This process will also discover all link-local addresses. See Section 2.6.1.4.

Another way works only for local network, it consists in sending a ICMP ECHO_REQUEST to the link-local multicast address ff02::1 which is all IPv6 nodes on the network. All nodes should reply to this ECHO_REQUEST per [RFC4443].

Other techniques involve enumerating the DNS zones, especially looking at reverse DNS records and CNAMES. Or scanning for DNS misconfigurations to find DNS servers that send NXDOMAIN instead of NOERROR for non-existing nodes with children, which violates RFC8020.

Other techniques involve obtaining data from DNS, parsing log files, leveraging service discovery such as mDNS RFC6761 and RFC6763.

Enumerating DNS zones, especially looking at reverse DNS records and CNAMES, can be done by exploiting RFC8020. As already metioned in RFC7707, this allows an attacker to prune the IPv6 reverse DNS tree, and hence enumerate it in a feasible time. Furthermore, authoritative servers that allow zone transfers (AXFR) may be a further information source.

2.6.2.3. Correlation

In an IPv4 network, it is easy to correlate multiple logs, for example to find events related to a specific IPv4 address. A simple Unix grep command was enough to scan through multiple text-based files and extract all lines relevant to a specific IPv4 address.

In an IPv6 network, this is slightly more difficult because different character strings can express the same IPv6 address. Therefore, the simple Unix grep command cannot be used. Moreover, an IPv6 node can have multiple IPv6 addresses.

In order to do correlation in IPv6-related logs, it is advised to have all logs with canonical IPv6 addresses. Then, the neighbor cache current (or historical) data set must be searched to find the data-link layer address of the IPv6 address. Then, the current and historical neighbor cache data sets must be searched for all IPv6 addresses associated to this data-link layer address: this is the search set. The last step is to search in all log files (containing only IPv6 address in canonical format) for any IPv6 addresses in the search set.

2.6.2.4. Abnormal Behavior Detection

Abnormal behaviors (such as network scanning, spamming, denial of service) can be detected in the same way as in an IPv4 network

2.6.3. Summary

While some data sources (IPfix, MIB, switch CAM tables, logs, ...) used in IPv4 are also used in the secure operation of an IPv6 network, the DHCPv6 lease file is less reliable and the neighbor cache is of prime importance.

The fact that there are multiple ways to express in a character string the same IPv6 address renders the use of filters mandatory when correlation must be done.

2.7. Transition/Coexistence Technologies

As it is expected that network will not run in a pure IPv6-only way, the different transition mechanisms must be deployed and operated in a secure way. This section proposes operational guidelines for the most known and deployed transition techniques.

2.7.1. Dual Stack

Dual stack is often the first deployment choice for most existing network operators without an MPLS core where 6PE RFC4798 is quite common. Dual stacking the network offers some advantages over other transition mechanisms. Firstly, it is easy to turn on without impacting normal IPv4 operations. Secondly, perhaps more importantly, it is easier to troubleshoot when things break. Dual stack allows you to gradually turn IPv4 operations down when your IPv6 network is ready for prime time. On the other, the operators have to manage two networks with the added complexities.

From an operational security perspective, this now means that you have twice the exposure. One needs to think about protecting both protocols now. At a minimum, the IPv6 portion of a dual stacked network should maintain parity with IPv4 from a security policy point of view. Typically, the following methods are employed to protect IPv4 networks at the edge:

It is recommended that these ACLs and/or firewalls be additionally configured to protect IPv6 communications. Also, given the end-to-end connectivity that IPv6 provides, it is also recommended that hosts be fortified against threats. General device hardening guidelines are provided in Section 2.8

For many years, all host operating systems have IPv6 enabled by default, so, it is possible even in an 'IPv4-only' network to attack layer-2 adjacent victims over IPv6 link-local address or over a global IPv6 address is rogue RA or rogue DHCPv6 addresses are provided by an attacker.

2.7.2. Transition Mechanisms

There are many tunnels used for specific use cases. Except when protected by IPsec, all those tunnels have a couple of security issues (most of them being described in RFC 6169);

To mitigate the bypassing of security policies, it is recomended to block all default configuration tunnels by denying all IPv4 traffic matching:

Ingress filtering should also be applied on all tunnel endpoints if applicable to prevent IPv6 address spoofing.

As several of the tunnel techniques share the same encapsulation (i.e. IPv4 protocol 41) and embed the IPv4 address in the IPv6 address, there are a set of well-known looping attacks described in RFC 6324, this RFC also proposes mitigation techniques.

2.7.2.1. Site-to-Site Static Tunnels

Site-to-site static tunnels are described in RFC 2529 and in GRE. As the IPv4 endpoints are statically configured and are not dynamic they are slightly more secure (bi-directional service theft is mostly impossible) but traffic interception and tunnel injection are still possible. Therefore, the use of IPsec in transport mode and protecting the encapsulated IPv4 packets is recommended for those tunnels. Alternatively, IPsec in tunnel mode can be used to transport IPv6 traffic over a non-trusted IPv4 network.

2.7.2.2. ISATAP

ISATAP tunnels [RFC5214] are mainly used within a single administrative domain and to connect a single IPv6 host to the IPv6 network. This means that endpoints and and the tunnel endpoint are usually managed by a single entity; therefore, audit trail and strict anti-spoofing are usually possible and this raises the overall security.

Special care must be taken to avoid looping attack by implementing the measures of RFC 6324 and of RFC6964.

IPsec in transport or tunnel mode can be used to secure the IPv4 ISATAP traffic to provide IPv6 traffic confidentiality and prevent service theft.

2.7.2.3. Teredo

Teredo tunnels [RFC4380] are mainly used in a residential environment because that can easily traverse an IPv4 NAT-PT device thanks to its UDP encapsulation and they connect a single host to the IPv6 Internet. Teredo shares the same issues as other tunnels: no authentication, no confidentiality, possible spoofing and reflection attacks.

IPsec for the transported IPv6 traffic is recommended.

The biggest threat to Teredo is probably for IPv4-only network as Teredo has been designed to easily traverse IPV4 NAT-PT devices which are quite often co-located with a stateful firewall. Therefore, if the stateful IPv4 firewall allows unrestricted UDP outbound and accept the return UDP traffic, then Teredo actually punches a hole in this firewall for all IPv6 traffic to the Internet and from the Internet. While host policies can be deployed to block Teredo in an IPv4-only network in order to avoid this firewall bypass, it would be more efficient to block all UDP outbound traffic at the IPv4 firewall if deemed possible (of course, at least port 53 should be left open for DNS traffic).

Teredo is now mostly never used and it is no more automated in most environment, so, it is less of a threat.

2.7.2.4. 6to4

6to4 tunnels require a public routable IPv4 address in order to work correctly. They can be used to provide either one IPv6 host connectivity to the IPv6 Internet or multiple IPv6 networks connectivity to the IPv6 Internet. The 6to4 relay is usually the anycast address defined in RFC3068 which has been deprecated by RFC7526, and is no more used by recent Operating Systems. Some security considerations are explained in RFC3694.

RFC6343 points out that if an operator provides well-managed servers and relays for 6to4, non-encapsulated IPv6 packets will pass through well- defined points (the native IPv6 interfaces of those servers and relays) at which security mechanisms may be applied. Client usage of 6to4 by default is now discouraged, and significant precautions are needed to avoid operational problems.

2.7.2.5. 6rd

While 6rd tunnels share the same encapsulation as 6to4 tunnels, they are designed to be used within a single SP domain, in other words they are deployed in a more constrained environment than 6to4 tunnels and have little security issues except lack of confidentiality. The security considerations (Section 12) of RFC5969 describes how to secure the 6rd tunnels.

IPsec for the transported IPv6 traffic can be used if confidentiality is important.

2.7.2.6. 6PE and 6VPE

Organizations using MPLS in their core can also use 6PE [RFC4798] and 6VPE RFC4659 to enable IPv6 access over MPLS. As 6PE and 6VPE are really similar to BGP/MPLS IP VPN described in RFC4364, the security of these networks is also similar to the one described in RFC4381. It relies on:

2.7.2.7. DS-Lite

DS-lite is more a translation mechanism and is therefore analyzed further in this document.

2.7.2.8. Mapping of Address and Port

With the tunnel and encapsulation versions of mapping of Address and Port (MAP-E and MAP-T), the access network is purely an IPv6 network and MAP protocols are used to give IPv4 hosts on the subscriber network, access to IPv4 hosts on the Internet. The subscriber router does stateful operations in order to map all internal IPv4 addresses and layer-4 ports to the IPv4 address and the set of layer-4 ports received through MAP configuration process. The SP equipment always does stateless operations (either decapsulation or stateless translation). Therefore, as opposed to Section 2.7.3.3 there is no state-exhaustion DoS attack against the SP equipment because there is no state and there is no operation caused by a new layer-4 connection (no logging operation).

The SP MAP equipment MUST implement all the security considerations of [RFC7597]; notably, ensuring that the mapping of the IPv4 address and port are consistent with the configuration. As MAP has a predictable IPv4 address and port mapping, the audit logs are easier to manager.

2.7.3. Translation Mechanisms

Translation mechanisms between IPv4 and IPv6 networks are alternative coexistence strategies while networks transition to IPv6. While a framework is described in [RFC6144] the specific security considerations are documented in each individual mechanism. For the most part they specifically mention interference with IPsec or DNSSEC deployments, how to mitigate spoofed traffic and what some effective filtering strategies may be.

2.7.3.1. Carrier-Grade Nat (CGN)

Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN), also called NAT444 CGN or Large Scale NAT (LSN) or SP NAT is described in [RFC6264] and is utilized as an interim measure to prolong the use of IPv4 in a large service provider network until the provider can deploy and effective IPv6 solution. [RFC6598] requested a specific IANA allocated /10 IPv4 address block to be used as address space shared by all access networks using CGN. This has been allocated as 100.64.0.0/10.

Section 13 of [RFC6269] lists some specific security-related issues caused by large scale address sharing. The Security Considerations section of [RFC6598] also lists some specific mitigation techniques for potential misuse of shared address space.

RFC7422 suggests the use of deterministic address mapping in order to reduce logging requirements for CGN. The idea is to have an algorithm mapping back and forth the internal subscriber to public ports.

2.7.3.2. NAT64/DNS64

Stateful NAT64 translation [RFC6146] allows IPv6-only clients to contact IPv4 servers using unicast UDP, TCP, or ICMP. It can be used in conjunction with DNS64 [RFC6147], a mechanism which synthesizes AAAA records from existing A records. There is also a stateless NAT64 [RFC6145] which is similar for the security aspects with the added benefit of being stateless, so, less prone to a state exhaustion attack.

The Security Consideration sections of [RFC6146] and [RFC6147] list the comprehensive issues. A specific issue with the use of NAT64 is that it will interfere with most IPsec deployments unless UDP encapsulation is used. DNS64 has an incidence on DNSSEC see section 3.1 of [RFC7050].

2.7.3.3. DS-Lite

Dual-Stack Lite (DS-Lite) [RFC6333] is a transition technique that enables a service provider to share IPv4 addresses among customers by combining two well-known technologies: IP in IP (IPv4-in-IPv6) and Network Address and Port Translation (NAPT).

Security considerations with respect to DS-Lite mainly revolve around logging data, preventing DoS attacks from rogue devices (as the AFTR function is stateful) and restricting service offered by the AFTR only to registered customers.

Section 11 of [RFC6333] describes important security issues associated with this technology.

2.8. General Device Hardening

There are many environments which rely too much on the network infrastructure to disallow malicious traffic to get access to critical hosts. In new IPv6 deployments it has been common to see IPv6 traffic enabled but none of the typical access control mechanisms enabled for IPv6 device access. With the possibility of network device configuration mistakes and the growth of IPv6 in the overall Internet it is important to ensure that all individual devices are hardened agains miscreant behavior.

The following guidelines should be used to ensure appropriate hardening of the host, be it an individual computer or router, firewall, load-balancer,server, etc device.

3. Enterprises Specific Security Considerations

Enterprises generally have robust network security policies in place to protect existing IPv4 networks. These policies have been distilled from years of experiential knowledge of securing IPv4 networks. At the very least, it is recommended that enterprise networks have parity between their security policies for both protocol versions.

Security considerations in the enterprise can be broadly categorized into two sections - External and Internal.

3.1. External Security Considerations:

The external aspect deals with providing security at the edge or perimeter of the enterprise network where it meets the service providers network. This is commonly achieved by enforcing a security policy either by implementing dedicated firewalls with stateful packet inspection or a router with ACLs. A common default IPv4 policy on firewalls that could easily be ported to IPv6 is to allow all traffic outbound while only allowing specific traffic, such as established sessions, inbound (see also [RFC6092]). Here are a few more things that could enhance the default policy:

3.2. Internal Security Considerations:

The internal aspect deals with providing security inside the perimeter of the network, including the end host. The most significant concerns here are related to Neighbor Discovery. At the network level, it is recommended that all security considerations discussed in Section 2.3 be reviewed carefully and the recommendations be considered in-depth as well.

As mentioned in Section 2.6.2, care must be taken when running automated IPv6-in-IP4 tunnels.

Hosts need to be hardened directly through security policy to protect against security threats. The host firewall default capabilities have to be clearly understood, especially 3rd party ones which can have different settings for IPv4 or IPv6 default permit/deny behavior. In some cases, 3rd party firewalls have no IPv6 support whereas the native firewall installed by default has it. General device hardening guidelines are provided in Section 2.8

It should also be noted that many hosts still use IPv4 for transport for things like RADIUS, TACACS+, SYSLOG, etc. This will require some extra level of due diligence on the part of the operator.

4. Service Providers Security Considerations

4.1. BGP

The threats and mitigation techniques are identical between IPv4 and IPv6. Broadly speaking they are: Section 2.5.

These are explained in more detail in section

4.1.1. Remote Triggered Black Hole Filtering

RTBH [RFC5635] works identically in IPv4 and IPv6. IANA has allocated 100::/64 as discard prefix RFC6666.

4.2. Transition Mechanism

SP will typically use transition mechanisms such as 6rd, 6PE, MAP, DS-Lite which have been analyzed in the transition Section 2.7.2 section.

4.3. Lawful Intercept

The Lawful Intercept requirements are similar for IPv6 and IPv4 architectures and will be subject to the laws enforced in varying geographic regions. The local issues with each jurisdiction can make this challenging and both corporate legal and privacy personnel should be involved in discussions pertaining to what information gets logged and what the logging retention policies will be.

The target of interception will usually be a residential subscriber (e.g. his/her PPP session or physical line or CPE MAC address). With the absence of NAT on the CPE, IPv6 has the provision to allow for intercepting the traffic from a single host (a /128 target) rather than the whole set of hosts of a subscriber (which could be a /48, a /60 or /64).

In contrast, in mobile environments, since the 3GPP specifications allocate a /64 per device, it may be sufficient to intercept traffic from the /64 rather than specific /128's (since each time the device powers up it gets a new IID).

A sample architecture which was written for informational purposes is found in [RFC3924].

5. Residential Users Security Considerations

The IETF Homenet working group is working on how IPv6 residential network should be done; this obviously includes operational security considerations; but, this is still work in progress.

Residential users have usually less experience and knowledge about security or networking. As most of the recent hosts, smartphones, tablets have all IPv6 enabled by default, IPv6 security is important for those users. Even with an IPv4-only ISP, those users can get IPv6 Internet access with the help of Teredo tunnels. Several peer-to-peer programs (notably Bittorrent) support IPv6 and those programs can initiate a Teredo tunnel through the IPv4 residential gateway, with the consequence of making the internal host reachable from any IPv6 host on the Internet. It is therefore recommended that all host security products (personal firewall, ...) are configured with a dual-stack security policy.

If the Residential Gateway has IPv6 connectivity, [RFC7084] (which obsoletes [RFC6204]) defines the requirements of an IPv6 CPE and does not take position on the debate of default IPv6 security policy as defined in [RFC6092]:

[RFC6092] REC-49 states that a choice must be given to the user to select one of those two policies.

There is also an alternate solution which has been deployed notably by Swisscom ([I-D.ietf-v6ops-balanced-ipv6-security]: open to all outbound and inbound connections at the exception of an handful of TCP and UDP ports known as vulnerable.

6. Further Reading

There are several documents that describe in more details the security of an IPv6 network; these documents are not written by the IETF but are listed here for your convenience:

  1. Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6
  2. North American IPv6 Task Force Technology Report - IPv6 Security Technology Paper
  3. IPv6 Security

7. Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the following people for their useful comments: Mikael Abrahamsson, Fred Baker, Brian Carpenter, Tim Chown, Markus deBruen, Tobias Fiebig, Fernando Gont, Jeffry Handal, Panos Kampanakis, Erik Kline, Jouni Korhonen, Mark Lentczner, Bob Sleigh,Tarko Tikan (by alphabetical order).

8. IANA Considerations

This memo includes no request to IANA.

9. Security Considerations

This memo attempts to give an overview of security considerations of operating an IPv6 network both in an IPv6-only network and in utilizing the most widely deployed IPv4/IPv6 coexistence strategies.

10. References

10.1. Normative References

[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997.
[RFC2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, DOI 10.17487/RFC2460, December 1998.
[RFC6104] Chown, T. and S. Venaas, "Rogue IPv6 Router Advertisement Problem Statement", RFC 6104, DOI 10.17487/RFC6104, February 2011.
[RFC6105] Levy-Abegnoli, E., Van de Velde, G., Popoviciu, C. and J. Mohacsi, "IPv6 Router Advertisement Guard", RFC 6105, DOI 10.17487/RFC6105, February 2011.

10.2. Informative References

[CYMRU] "Packet Filter and Route Filter Recommendation for IPv6 at xSP routers"
[I-D.chakrabarti-nordmark-6man-efficient-nd] Chakrabarti, S., Nordmark, E., Thubert, P. and M. Wasserman, "IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Optimizations for Wired and Wireless Networks", Internet-Draft draft-chakrabarti-nordmark-6man-efficient-nd-07, February 2015.
[I-D.gont-opsec-ipv6-eh-filtering] Gont, F., Will, W. and R. Bonica, "Recommendations on Filtering of IPv6 Packets Containing IPv6 Extension Headers", Internet-Draft draft-gont-opsec-ipv6-eh-filtering-02, August 2014.
[I-D.ietf-6man-hbh-header-handling] Baker, F. and R. Bonica, "IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Options Extension Header", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-6man-hbh-header-handling-03, March 2016.
[I-D.ietf-v6ops-balanced-ipv6-security] Gysi, M., Leclanche, G., Vyncke, E. and R. Anfinsen, "Balanced Security for IPv6 Residential CPE", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-v6ops-balanced-ipv6-security-01, December 2013.
[I-D.ietf-v6ops-unique-ipv6-prefix-per-host] Brzozowski, J. and G. Velde, "Unique IPv6 Prefix Per Host", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-v6ops-unique-ipv6-prefix-per-host-13, October 2017.
[I-D.kampanakis-6man-ipv6-eh-parsing] Kampanakis, P., "Implementation Guidelines for parsing IPv6 Extension Headers", Internet-Draft draft-kampanakis-6man-ipv6-eh-parsing-01, August 2014.
[I-D.thubert-savi-ra-throttler] Thubert, P., "Throttling RAs on constrained interfaces", Internet-Draft draft-thubert-savi-ra-throttler-01, June 2012.
[IEEE-802.1X] IEEE, "IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks - Port-Based Network Access Control", IEEE Std 802.1X-2010, February 2010.
[IPv6_Security_Book] Hogg and Vyncke, "IPv6 Security", ISBN 1-58705-594-5, Publisher CiscoPress, December 2008.
[NAv6TF_Security] Kaeo, Green, Bound and Pouffary, "North American IPv6 Task Force Technology Report - IPv6 Security Technology Paper", 2006.
[NIST] Frankel, Graveman, Pearce and Rooks, "Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6", 2010.
[RFC0826] Plummer, D., "Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol: Or Converting Network Protocol Addresses to 48.bit Ethernet Address for Transmission on Ethernet Hardware", STD 37, RFC 826, DOI 10.17487/RFC0826, November 1982.
[RFC2131] Droms, R., "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", RFC 2131, DOI 10.17487/RFC2131, March 1997.
[RFC2529] Carpenter, B. and C. Jung, "Transmission of IPv6 over IPv4 Domains without Explicit Tunnels", RFC 2529, DOI 10.17487/RFC2529, March 1999.
[RFC2740] Coltun, R., Ferguson, D. and J. Moy, "OSPF for IPv6", RFC 2740, DOI 10.17487/RFC2740, December 1999.
[RFC2784] Farinacci, D., Li, T., Hanks, S., Meyer, D. and P. Traina, "Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)", RFC 2784, DOI 10.17487/RFC2784, March 2000.
[RFC2827] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, DOI 10.17487/RFC2827, May 2000.
[RFC2866] Rigney, C., "RADIUS Accounting", RFC 2866, DOI 10.17487/RFC2866, June 2000.
[RFC2993] Hain, T., "Architectural Implications of NAT", RFC 2993, DOI 10.17487/RFC2993, November 2000.
[RFC3056] Carpenter, B. and K. Moore, "Connection of IPv6 Domains via IPv4 Clouds", RFC 3056, DOI 10.17487/RFC3056, February 2001.
[RFC3068] Huitema, C., "An Anycast Prefix for 6to4 Relay Routers", RFC 3068, DOI 10.17487/RFC3068, June 2001.
[RFC3315] Droms, R., Bound, J., Volz, B., Lemon, T., Perkins, C. and M. Carney, "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6)", RFC 3315, DOI 10.17487/RFC3315, July 2003.
[RFC3627] Savola, P., "Use of /127 Prefix Length Between Routers Considered Harmful", RFC 3627, DOI 10.17487/RFC3627, September 2003.
[RFC3756] Nikander, P., Kempf, J. and E. Nordmark, "IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND) Trust Models and Threats", RFC 3756, DOI 10.17487/RFC3756, May 2004.
[RFC3924] Baker, F., Foster, B. and C. Sharp, "Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept in IP Networks", RFC 3924, DOI 10.17487/RFC3924, October 2004.
[RFC3964] Savola, P. and C. Patel, "Security Considerations for 6to4", RFC 3964, DOI 10.17487/RFC3964, December 2004.
[RFC3971] Arkko, J., Kempf, J., Zill, B. and P. Nikander, "SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND)", RFC 3971, DOI 10.17487/RFC3971, March 2005.
[RFC3972] Aura, T., "Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA)", RFC 3972, DOI 10.17487/RFC3972, March 2005.
[RFC4193] Hinden, R. and B. Haberman, "Unique Local IPv6 Unicast Addresses", RFC 4193, DOI 10.17487/RFC4193, October 2005.
[RFC4293] Routhier, S., "Management Information Base for the Internet Protocol (IP)", RFC 4293, DOI 10.17487/RFC4293, April 2006.
[RFC4301] Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, DOI 10.17487/RFC4301, December 2005.
[RFC4302] Kent, S., "IP Authentication Header", RFC 4302, DOI 10.17487/RFC4302, December 2005.
[RFC4303] Kent, S., "IP Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP)", RFC 4303, DOI 10.17487/RFC4303, December 2005.
[RFC4364] Rosen, E. and Y. Rekhter, "BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)", RFC 4364, DOI 10.17487/RFC4364, February 2006.
[RFC4380] Huitema, C., "Teredo: Tunneling IPv6 over UDP through Network Address Translations (NATs)", RFC 4380, DOI 10.17487/RFC4380, February 2006.
[RFC4381] Behringer, M., "Analysis of the Security of BGP/MPLS IP Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)", RFC 4381, DOI 10.17487/RFC4381, February 2006.
[RFC4443] Conta, A., Deering, S. and M. Gupta, "Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMPv6) for the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", STD 89, RFC 4443, DOI 10.17487/RFC4443, March 2006.
[RFC4552] Gupta, M. and N. Melam, "Authentication/Confidentiality for OSPFv3", RFC 4552, DOI 10.17487/RFC4552, June 2006.
[RFC4649] Volz, B., "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6) Relay Agent Remote-ID Option", RFC 4649, DOI 10.17487/RFC4649, August 2006.
[RFC4659] De Clercq, J., Ooms, D., Carugi, M. and F. Le Faucheur, "BGP-MPLS IP Virtual Private Network (VPN) Extension for IPv6 VPN", RFC 4659, DOI 10.17487/RFC4659, September 2006.
[RFC4798] De Clercq, J., Ooms, D., Prevost, S. and F. Le Faucheur, "Connecting IPv6 Islands over IPv4 MPLS Using IPv6 Provider Edge Routers (6PE)", RFC 4798, DOI 10.17487/RFC4798, February 2007.
[RFC4861] Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W. and H. Soliman, "Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6)", RFC 4861, DOI 10.17487/RFC4861, September 2007.
[RFC4864] Van de Velde, G., Hain, T., Droms, R., Carpenter, B. and E. Klein, "Local Network Protection for IPv6", RFC 4864, DOI 10.17487/RFC4864, May 2007.
[RFC4890] Davies, E. and J. Mohacsi, "Recommendations for Filtering ICMPv6 Messages in Firewalls", RFC 4890, DOI 10.17487/RFC4890, May 2007.
[RFC4941] Narten, T., Draves, R. and S. Krishnan, "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6", RFC 4941, DOI 10.17487/RFC4941, September 2007.
[RFC4942] Davies, E., Krishnan, S. and P. Savola, "IPv6 Transition/Co-existence Security Considerations", RFC 4942, DOI 10.17487/RFC4942, September 2007.
[RFC5157] Chown, T., "IPv6 Implications for Network Scanning", RFC 5157, DOI 10.17487/RFC5157, March 2008.
[RFC5214] Templin, F., Gleeson, T. and D. Thaler, "Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP)", RFC 5214, DOI 10.17487/RFC5214, March 2008.
[RFC5340] Coltun, R., Ferguson, D., Moy, J. and A. Lindem, "OSPF for IPv6", RFC 5340, DOI 10.17487/RFC5340, July 2008.
[RFC5635] Kumari, W. and D. McPherson, "Remote Triggered Black Hole Filtering with Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF)", RFC 5635, DOI 10.17487/RFC5635, August 2009.
[RFC5952] Kawamura, S. and M. Kawashima, "A Recommendation for IPv6 Address Text Representation", RFC 5952, DOI 10.17487/RFC5952, August 2010.
[RFC5969] Townsley, W. and O. Troan, "IPv6 Rapid Deployment on IPv4 Infrastructures (6rd) -- Protocol Specification", RFC 5969, DOI 10.17487/RFC5969, August 2010.
[RFC6092] Woodyatt, J., "Recommended Simple Security Capabilities in Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) for Providing Residential IPv6 Internet Service", RFC 6092, DOI 10.17487/RFC6092, January 2011.
[RFC6144] Baker, F., Li, X., Bao, C. and K. Yin, "Framework for IPv4/IPv6 Translation", RFC 6144, DOI 10.17487/RFC6144, April 2011.
[RFC6145] Li, X., Bao, C. and F. Baker, "IP/ICMP Translation Algorithm", RFC 6145, DOI 10.17487/RFC6145, April 2011.
[RFC6146] Bagnulo, M., Matthews, P. and I. van Beijnum, "Stateful NAT64: Network Address and Protocol Translation from IPv6 Clients to IPv4 Servers", RFC 6146, DOI 10.17487/RFC6146, April 2011.
[RFC6147] Bagnulo, M., Sullivan, A., Matthews, P. and I. van Beijnum, "DNS64: DNS Extensions for Network Address Translation from IPv6 Clients to IPv4 Servers", RFC 6147, DOI 10.17487/RFC6147, April 2011.
[RFC6164] Kohno, M., Nitzan, B., Bush, R., Matsuzaki, Y., Colitti, L. and T. Narten, "Using 127-Bit IPv6 Prefixes on Inter-Router Links", RFC 6164, DOI 10.17487/RFC6164, April 2011.
[RFC6169] Krishnan, S., Thaler, D. and J. Hoagland, "Security Concerns with IP Tunneling", RFC 6169, DOI 10.17487/RFC6169, April 2011.
[RFC6192] Dugal, D., Pignataro, C. and R. Dunn, "Protecting the Router Control Plane", RFC 6192, DOI 10.17487/RFC6192, March 2011.
[RFC6204] Singh, H., Beebee, W., Donley, C., Stark, B. and O. Troan, "Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers", RFC 6204, DOI 10.17487/RFC6204, April 2011.
[RFC6221] Miles, D., Ooghe, S., Dec, W., Krishnan, S. and A. Kavanagh, "Lightweight DHCPv6 Relay Agent", RFC 6221, DOI 10.17487/RFC6221, May 2011.
[RFC6264] Jiang, S., Guo, D. and B. Carpenter, "An Incremental Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) for IPv6 Transition", RFC 6264, DOI 10.17487/RFC6264, June 2011.
[RFC6269] Ford, M., Boucadair, M., Durand, A., Levis, P. and P. Roberts, "Issues with IP Address Sharing", RFC 6269, DOI 10.17487/RFC6269, June 2011.
[RFC6296] Wasserman, M. and F. Baker, "IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Prefix Translation", RFC 6296, DOI 10.17487/RFC6296, June 2011.
[RFC6302] Durand, A., Gashinsky, I., Lee, D. and S. Sheppard, "Logging Recommendations for Internet-Facing Servers", BCP 162, RFC 6302, DOI 10.17487/RFC6302, June 2011.
[RFC6324] Nakibly, G. and F. Templin, "Routing Loop Attack Using IPv6 Automatic Tunnels: Problem Statement and Proposed Mitigations", RFC 6324, DOI 10.17487/RFC6324, August 2011.
[RFC6333] Durand, A., Droms, R., Woodyatt, J. and Y. Lee, "Dual-Stack Lite Broadband Deployments Following IPv4 Exhaustion", RFC 6333, DOI 10.17487/RFC6333, August 2011.
[RFC6343] Carpenter, B., "Advisory Guidelines for 6to4 Deployment", RFC 6343, DOI 10.17487/RFC6343, August 2011.
[RFC6434] Jankiewicz, E., Loughney, J. and T. Narten, "IPv6 Node Requirements", RFC 6434, DOI 10.17487/RFC6434, December 2011.
[RFC6459] Korhonen, J., Soininen, J., Patil, B., Savolainen, T., Bajko, G. and K. Iisakkila, "IPv6 in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Evolved Packet System (EPS)", RFC 6459, DOI 10.17487/RFC6459, January 2012.
[RFC6506] Bhatia, M., Manral, V. and A. Lindem, "Supporting Authentication Trailer for OSPFv3", RFC 6506, DOI 10.17487/RFC6506, February 2012.
[RFC6547] George, W., "RFC 3627 to Historic Status", RFC 6547, DOI 10.17487/RFC6547, February 2012.
[RFC6564] Krishnan, S., Woodyatt, J., Kline, E., Hoagland, J. and M. Bhatia, "A Uniform Format for IPv6 Extension Headers", RFC 6564, DOI 10.17487/RFC6564, April 2012.
[RFC6583] Gashinsky, I., Jaeggli, J. and W. Kumari, "Operational Neighbor Discovery Problems", RFC 6583, DOI 10.17487/RFC6583, March 2012.
[RFC6598] Weil, J., Kuarsingh, V., Donley, C., Liljenstolpe, C. and M. Azinger, "IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space", BCP 153, RFC 6598, DOI 10.17487/RFC6598, April 2012.
[RFC6620] Nordmark, E., Bagnulo, M. and E. Levy-Abegnoli, "FCFS SAVI: First-Come, First-Served Source Address Validation Improvement for Locally Assigned IPv6 Addresses", RFC 6620, DOI 10.17487/RFC6620, May 2012.
[RFC6666] Hilliard, N. and D. Freedman, "A Discard Prefix for IPv6", RFC 6666, DOI 10.17487/RFC6666, August 2012.
[RFC6762] Cheshire, S. and M. Krochmal, "Multicast DNS", RFC 6762, DOI 10.17487/RFC6762, February 2013.
[RFC6763] Cheshire, S. and M. Krochmal, "DNS-Based Service Discovery", RFC 6763, DOI 10.17487/RFC6763, February 2013.
[RFC6810] Bush, R. and R. Austein, "The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to Router Protocol", RFC 6810, DOI 10.17487/RFC6810, January 2013.
[RFC6964] Templin, F., "Operational Guidance for IPv6 Deployment in IPv4 Sites Using the Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP)", RFC 6964, DOI 10.17487/RFC6964, May 2013.
[RFC6980] Gont, F., "Security Implications of IPv6 Fragmentation with IPv6 Neighbor Discovery", RFC 6980, DOI 10.17487/RFC6980, August 2013.
[RFC7011] Claise, B., Trammell, B. and P. Aitken, "Specification of the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX) Protocol for the Exchange of Flow Information", STD 77, RFC 7011, DOI 10.17487/RFC7011, September 2013.
[RFC7012] Claise, B. and B. Trammell, "Information Model for IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)", RFC 7012, DOI 10.17487/RFC7012, September 2013.
[RFC7039] Wu, J., Bi, J., Bagnulo, M., Baker, F. and C. Vogt, "Source Address Validation Improvement (SAVI) Framework", RFC 7039, DOI 10.17487/RFC7039, October 2013.
[RFC7045] Carpenter, B. and S. Jiang, "Transmission and Processing of IPv6 Extension Headers", RFC 7045, DOI 10.17487/RFC7045, December 2013.
[RFC7050] Savolainen, T., Korhonen, J. and D. Wing, "Discovery of the IPv6 Prefix Used for IPv6 Address Synthesis", RFC 7050, DOI 10.17487/RFC7050, November 2013.
[RFC7084] Singh, H., Beebee, W., Donley, C. and B. Stark, "Basic Requirements for IPv6 Customer Edge Routers", RFC 7084, DOI 10.17487/RFC7084, November 2013.
[RFC7112] Gont, F., Manral, V. and R. Bonica, "Implications of Oversized IPv6 Header Chains", RFC 7112, DOI 10.17487/RFC7112, January 2014.
[RFC7113] Gont, F., "Implementation Advice for IPv6 Router Advertisement Guard (RA-Guard)", RFC 7113, DOI 10.17487/RFC7113, February 2014.
[RFC7166] Bhatia, M., Manral, V. and A. Lindem, "Supporting Authentication Trailer for OSPFv3", RFC 7166, DOI 10.17487/RFC7166, March 2014.
[RFC7217] Gont, F., "A Method for Generating Semantically Opaque Interface Identifiers with IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC)", RFC 7217, DOI 10.17487/RFC7217, April 2014.
[RFC7381] Chittimaneni, K., Chown, T., Howard, L., Kuarsingh, V., Pouffary, Y. and E. Vyncke, "Enterprise IPv6 Deployment Guidelines", RFC 7381, DOI 10.17487/RFC7381, October 2014.
[RFC7404] Behringer, M. and E. Vyncke, "Using Only Link-Local Addressing inside an IPv6 Network", RFC 7404, DOI 10.17487/RFC7404, November 2014.
[RFC7422] Donley, C., Grundemann, C., Sarawat, V., Sundaresan, K. and O. Vautrin, "Deterministic Address Mapping to Reduce Logging in Carrier-Grade NAT Deployments", RFC 7422, DOI 10.17487/RFC7422, December 2014.
[RFC7454] Durand, J., Pepelnjak, I. and G. Doering, "BGP Operations and Security", BCP 194, RFC 7454, DOI 10.17487/RFC7454, February 2015.
[RFC7513] Bi, J., Wu, J., Yao, G. and F. Baker, "Source Address Validation Improvement (SAVI) Solution for DHCP", RFC 7513, DOI 10.17487/RFC7513, May 2015.
[RFC7526] Troan, O. and B. Carpenter, "Deprecating the Anycast Prefix for 6to4 Relay Routers", BCP 196, RFC 7526, DOI 10.17487/RFC7526, May 2015.
[RFC7597] Troan, O., Dec, W., Li, X., Bao, C., Matsushima, S., Murakami, T. and T. Taylor, "Mapping of Address and Port with Encapsulation (MAP-E)", RFC 7597, DOI 10.17487/RFC7597, July 2015.
[RFC7599] Li, X., Bao, C., Dec, W., Troan, O., Matsushima, S. and T. Murakami, "Mapping of Address and Port using Translation (MAP-T)", RFC 7599, DOI 10.17487/RFC7599, July 2015.
[RFC7610] Gont, F., Liu, W. and G. Van de Velde, "DHCPv6-Shield: Protecting against Rogue DHCPv6 Servers", BCP 199, RFC 7610, DOI 10.17487/RFC7610, August 2015.
[RFC7707] Gont, F. and T. Chown, "Network Reconnaissance in IPv6 Networks", RFC 7707, DOI 10.17487/RFC7707, March 2016.
[RFC7721] Cooper, A., Gont, F. and D. Thaler, "Security and Privacy Considerations for IPv6 Address Generation Mechanisms", RFC 7721, DOI 10.17487/RFC7721, March 2016.
[RFC7872] Gont, F., Linkova, J., Chown, T. and W. Liu, "Observations on the Dropping of Packets with IPv6 Extension Headers in the Real World", RFC 7872, DOI 10.17487/RFC7872, June 2016.
[RFC8020] Bortzmeyer, S. and S. Huque, "NXDOMAIN: There Really Is Nothing Underneath", RFC 8020, DOI 10.17487/RFC8020, November 2016.
[RFC8064] Gont, F., Cooper, A., Thaler, D. and W. Liu, "Recommendation on Stable IPv6 Interface Identifiers", RFC 8064, DOI 10.17487/RFC8064, February 2017.
[SCANNING] "Mapping the Great Void - Smarter scanning for IPv6"

Authors' Addresses

Eric Vyncke (editor) Cisco De Kleetlaan 6a Diegem, 1831 Belgium Phone: +32 2 778 4677 EMail: evyncke@cisco.com
Kiran K. Chittimaneni Dropbox Inc. 185 Berry Street, Suite 400 San Francisco, CA, 94107 USA EMail: kk@dropbox.com
Merike Kaeo Double Shot Security 3518 Fremont Ave N 363 Seattle, 98103 USA Phone: +12066696394 EMail: merike@doubleshotsecurity.com