Using /126 for IPv6 router links

Mon Jan 25 10:58:26 UTC 2010

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 01:14:17AM -0800, Matthew Petach wrote:
> 
> As I mentioned in my lightning talk at the last NANOG, we reserved a
> /64 for each PtP link, but configured it as the first /126 out of the
> /64.  That gives us the most flexibility for expanding to the full /64
> later if necessary, but prevents us from being victim of the classic
> v6 neighbor discovery attack that you're prone to if you configure the
> entire /64 on the link.  All someone out on the 'net needs to do is
> scan up through your address space on the link as quickly as possible,
> sending single packets at all the non-existent addresses on the link,
> and watch as your router CPU starts to churn keeping track of all the
> neighbor discovery messages, state table updates, and incomplete
> age-outs.  With the link configured as a /126, there's a very small

That's an attack vector you have to worry about even today with IPv4
space. There are quite a few vendors who you can make fall over with CPU
trying to do arp resolution and/or cam exhaustion just by doing "ip
address x.x.x.x/16" as a directly connected block on an Ethernet
interface. One redeeming quality to the whole autoconfig thing is it'll
do a great job cutting down on port scanning for vulnerabilities on end
hosts (or else make the flood of port scanning traffic 2^64 times worse,
it remains to be seen I suppose :P). My personal theory is it will
result in a black market of buying and selling people's active IPv6
addresses from various website logs and the like, so hax0rs will have
something to scan. In a few years time it will probably be popular with
end users to periodicially "rotate the shield frequencies" with their
final 64 bits, or maybe even use them on a per-transaction basis for
extra security. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)