doi: 10.7763/IJFCC.2014.V3.323
IPv6 Host Address Usage Survey
Qinwen Hu
1
,
- 1 at computer science department of the University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand.
- 2 CAIDA (the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis), the WAND Network Research group at the University of Waikato and the IPFIX (IP Flow Information Export) Working Group.
Abstract
It is tempting to assume that for IPv6, with its64-bit Interface IDs (IIDs), some existing address scanningattacks have become infeasible. RFC 5157 suggests howInterface IDs could be allocated so as to minimize a site’svulnerability to address scans, essentially by using IIDsconsisting of a pseudorandom sequence of 1s and 0s. In thispaper, we investigate how network administrators are actuallyallocating their Interface IDs. We have developed and carriedout a survey of various IPv6 addresses from 50 countries. Wefind that few network administrators are using RFC 5157’sallocation methods; instead we find that most networkadministrators are using one of five simple allocation schemeswhich tend to leave zero bits in large sections of their InterfaceIDs. We observe that such schemes can leave networksvulnerable to address scanning.
Keywords
- Address allocation mechanisms
- IPv6
- privacy
- security
How to Cite
Qinwen Hu and Nevil Brownlee, "IPv6 Host Address Usage Survey," International Journal of Future Computer and Communication, vol. 3, no. 5, pp. 341-345, 2014. https://doi.org/ 10.7763/IJFCC.2014.V3.323
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2014 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).