IPv6 Security

Interface 2011 Denver, Colorado October 20, 2011

Scott Hogg
GTRI - Director of Technology Solutions CCIE #5133, CISSP #4610
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IPv6 Adoption
IPv6 is the next generation computer network protocol for use on the Internet and within private networks. IPv6 is a standard defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and was first specified in the mid-90s. IPv6 is designed to replace IPv4 but IPv6 is a different protocol than IPv4 yet they can both coexist. IPv6 has taken many years to mature and get ready for mass deployment and now IPv6 is deployed on the global Internet. IPv4 address exhaustion has occurred and has limited expansion of the Internet.

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IPv6 Address Allocations

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Number of IPv6 Prefixes and ASNs

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IPv6 Coming to a Network Near You

An IPv6-enabled Internet already exists. An IPv6 transition is already underway in the U.S. Federal Government and other parts of the world. IPv6 infrastructure and Host OSs are ready now! Much of the infrastructure you have already purchased is IPv6 capable (software upgrade); its just a matter of enabling it. Service providers have initial IPv6 services and are continuing to work on their deployments. Organizations that connect to the Internet now need to learn about IPv6 and prepare their systems to communicate using this protocol. You will be transitioning to IPv6 over the coming years and you want to consider the security implications of IPv6 before you deploy it throughout your network.
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IPv6 Security Latent Threat

Even if you havent started using IPv6 yet, you probably have some IPv6 running on your networks already and didnt know it Do you use Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, or Microsoft Vista/Windows 7 systems in your environment?
They all come with IPv6 capability, some even have IPv6 enabled by default (IPv6 preferred) They may try to use IPv6 first and then fall-back to IPv4 Or they may create IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels to Internet resources to reach IPv6 content Some of these techniques take place regardless of user input or configuration

If you are not protecting your IPv6 nodes then you have just allowed a huge back-door to exist
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IPv6 Security Threats

There isnt a large hacker community focusing on IPv6 today but it is starting to gain the attackers attention THC IPv6 Attack Toolkit, IPv6 port scan tools, IPv6 packet forgery tools and IPv6 DoS tools all exist and continue to evolve Many major vendors and open-source software have already published IPv6 bugs/vulnerabilities Attacks at the layers below and above the network layer are unaffected by the security of IPv6
Buffer overflows, SQL Injection, cross-site scripting will all remain valid attacks on IPv6 servers E-mail/SPAM is still a problem in IPv6 nets
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Reconnaissance
Ping sweeps, port scans, application vulnerability scans are problematic with IPv6s large address space - brute-force scanning a /64 is not practical There are methods of speeding up reconnaissance
ping6 -I eth0 ff02::1 [root@hat ~]# ./alive6 eth0 ff02::1 Node Information Queries (RFC 4620) in BSD Scanning for specific EUI-64 addresses using specific OUIs Scanning IPv4 and getting IPv6 info
Metasploit Framework ipv6_neighbor" auxiliary module can leverage IPv4 to find IPv6 hosts

Scanning 6to4, ISATAP, Teredo addresses Attackers may find one node and leverage the neighbor cache to find other nodes DHCPv6 logs, DNS servers, server logs, NMSs, Google
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IPv6 Privacy Addressing

Privacy of addresses in an issue with IPv6
EUI-64 addresses are derived from the hosts MAC That could be used to track users activity and thus identity

Temporary and Privacy IPv6 address intended to protect the identity of the end-user
MD5 hash of the EUI-64 concatenated with a random number that can change over time Different implementations rotate the address at different frequencies can be disabled

Forensics and troubleshooting are difficult with privacy addresses Who had what address when? Dynamic DNS and firewall state updates Difficulty creating granular firewall policy when IP addresses change often Better to use DHCPv6 with randomized IIDs
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IPv6 Attack Tools

THC IPv6 Attack Toolkit
parasite6, alive6, fake_router6, redir6, toobig6, detect-new-ip6, dos-new-ip6, fake_mld6, fake_mipv6, fake_advertiser6, smurf6, rsmurf6

Scanners
Nmap, halfscan6, Scan6, CHScanner

Packet forgery
Scapy6, SendIP, Packit, Spak6

DoS Tools
6tunneldos, 4to6ddos, Imps6-tools
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LAN Threats
IPv6 uses ICMPv6 for many LAN operations Stateless auto-configuration Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 ARP same attack types Spoofed RAs can renumber hosts or launch a MITM attack Forged NA/NS messages to confuse NDP Redirects same as ICMPv4 redirects Forcing nodes to believe all addresses are on-link These attacks presume the attacker is on-net or has compromised a local computer
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Methods of Preventing Rogue RAs

Prevent unauthorized LAN access Disable unused switch ports Network Access Control (NAC), Network Admission Control (NAC) IEEE 802.1AE (MACsec), Cisco TrustSec Allow IEEE 802.1X Block Incoming RA Guard (RFC 6105) Incoming RA Message RA Message NDPMon Ramond Allow Sending Kame rafixd RAs Port Security Cisco Port-based ACL (PACL)
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Extension Headers
There are rules for the frequency and order of various extension headers Hop-by-Hop and Destination Options Header Manipulation Crafted Packets Large chains of extension headers Separate payload into second fragment Consume resources - DoS Invalid Extension Headers DoS Routing Headers Type 0 source routing Routers can be configured to block RH0 This is now the default on newer routers Firewalls, Windows, Linux and MacOS all block RH0 by default

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Fragmentation
In IPv6 routers do not fragment Fragments destined for network device should be dropped IPv6 links must have MTU >= 1280 bytes Fragments with less than 1280 bytes should be dropped with the exception of the last fragment It is left to the end-systems to perform Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) ICMPv6 Type 2 - Packet Too Big Fragmentation can hide attacks or as an attack itself on the upper layers Overlapping fragments, out of order fragments, tiny fragments Handling of Overlapping IPv6 Fragments - RFC 5722
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Layer-3/4 Spoofing
Spoofing of IPv6 packets is possible IPv6 BOGON (Martians) Filtering is required
Filter traffic from unallocated space and filter router advertisements of bogus prefixes Permit Legitimate Global Unicast Addresses Dont block FF00::/8 and FE80::/10 these will block NDP

Hierarchical addressing and ingress/egress filtering can catch packets with forged source addresses Tracebacks may prove to be easier with IPv6 You can use inbound Infrastructure ACLs (iACLs) that deny packets sent to infrastructure IPv6 addresses
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Transition Mechanism Threats

Dual Stack is the preferred transition method You are only as strong as the weakest of the two stacks Running dual stack will give you at least twice the number of vulnerabilities and require twice the work to secure

IPv4

IPv6

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Threats Against Translation

Manual Tunnels
Preferred over dynamic tunnels Filter tunnel source/destination and use IPsec If spoofing, return traffic is not sent to attacker

Dynamic Tunnels
6to4 Relay routers are open relays Attackers can guess 6to4 addresses easily ISATAP can have potential MITM attacks Attackers can spoof source/dest IPv4/v6 addresses

Translation techniques are susceptible to DoS attacks

NAT prevents IPsec, DNSSEC, Geolocation and other applications from working Consuming connection state (CPU resource consumption attack on ALG) Consuming public IPv4 pool and port numbers (pool depletion attack)
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Application Threats
Applications for IPv4 and IPv6 are the same Buffer overflows, SQL Injection, cross-site scripting will all remain valid attacks on IPv6 servers Use of IPsec can prevent many of these attacks that exploit trust between servers Completely hierarchal addressing will make trace-back easier but privacy addressing and forged MAC addresses wont E-mail/SPAM is still a problem in IPv6 nets DNS servers will still be attacked

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IPv6 Firewalls
Dont just use your IPv4 policy for your IPv6 policy Dont blindly allow IPsec or IPv4 Protocol 41 (6in4 tunneled traffic) through the firewall unless you know the tunnel endpoints Firewalls have improved their IPv6 capabilities, IPv6 addresses in the GUI, some logs, ability to filter on Extension Headers, Fragmentation, PMTUD, and granular filtering of ICMPv6 and multicast

IPv6 firewalls may not have all the same full features as IPv4 firewalls
UTM/DPI/IPS/WAF/content filtering features may only work for IPv4

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IPv6 Intrusion Prevention

Few signatures exist for IPv6 packets or you have to build your own using cryptic regular expressions or byte-offset values IPSs should send out notifications when nonconforming IPv6 packets are observed having faulty parameters, bad extension headers, source address is a multicast address Many IPSs dont inspect packets that are encapsulated (6in4, 6to4, 6in6, ISATAP, Teredo, 6rd, DS-Lite) IPv6 support varies greatly in modern IPS systems Talk with your vendor about what you need

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Host-Based Firewalls and AV

There are many IPv6-capable host-based firewalls available depending on the OS you prefer
Linux: ip6tables (NetFilter), ipf Windows Firewall with Advanced Security BSD: pf, ipfw, ipf Mac: ipfw, ipf Solaris, HP-UX : ipf

Few Host-based IPS systems support IPv6 Desktop AntiVirus software has gotten better at allowing ICMPv6 (RA/RS/NA/NS) packets through However, there are still a handful of popular AV suites that dont support IPv6
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Capturing and Monitoring IPv6

SPAN ports add CPU overhead to switches and may not capture all the traffic you want Taps are by far a better method than hubs Packet Monitoring Matrix Switches can monitor ports and send traffic to tool ports They have flexible admin interface and advanced filtering capabilities to help you reduce the monitored traffic and more precisely look at what you are interested Flexible matching of packets based on rules Traffic can be collected from multiple sources and sent to a single tool port Traffic can be forked and sent to multiple tool ports
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Packet Monitoring Matrix Switches

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Anue Net Tool Optimizer

IPv6 addresses can be specified in the filter criteria

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IP Security (IPsec)
IPsec was first designed for IPv6 and then was added to IPv4 where it became widely deployed IPsec is defined by the IETF as several complimentary protocols
Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) Authentication Header (AH) Internet Key Exchange (IKE)

IPsec can provide the following protections

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Data origin authentication Connectionless integrity Replay protection Confidentiality (encryption) Traffic flow confidentiality Access control
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IPv6 Security Policies

Many security standards dont discuss IPv6. However, any guideline related to IP may apply to both versions many policies are higher level NIST SP 800-119: Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6, December 2010
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800119/sp800-119.pdf

NIST Special Publication (SP) 500-267: A Profile for IPv6 in the U.S. Government V1, USGv6-V2 comments due June 10, 2011, results Sept. 2011
USGv6 Profile tests for granular filtering of IPv6 and ICMPv6 messages
http://www.antd.nist.gov/usgv6/cfp.html
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Summary of BCPs
Perform IPv6 filtering at the perimeter Use RFC2827 filtering and Unicast RPF checks throughout the network Use manual tunnels (with IPsec whenever possible) instead of dynamic tunnels and deny packets for transition techniques not used Use common access-network security measures (NAC/802.1X, disable unused switch ports, Ethernet port security, MACSec/TrustSec) because SEND wont be available any time soon Strive to achieve equal protections for IPv6 as with IPv4 Continue to let vendors know what you expect in terms of IPv6 security features

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Yet another IPv6 Book

IPv6 Security, By Scott Hogg and Eric Vyncke, Cisco Press, 2009.

ISBN-10: 1-58705-594-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-58705-594-2

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