IPv6 Flaw Could Greatly Amplify DDoS Attacks

tygerstripes writes "The Register has a story about the discovery of a flaw in part of the IPv6 specification which has experts scrambling to have the feature removed, or at least disabled by default. From the article: 'The specification, known as the Type 0 Routing Header (RH0), allows computers to tell IPv6 routers to send data by a specific route. Originally envisioned as a way to let mobile users to retain a single IP for their devices... RH0 support allows attackers to amplify denial-of-service attacks on IPv6 infrastructure by a factor of at least 80.' Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, described the fault bluntly. 'It can be exploited by any greedy Estonian teenager with a $300 Linux machine.'"

Comments

Who gives a $%##?

[toadlife]

Why you say?

Because IPv6 will never be implemented widely anyway.

Why will it not you say?

Because too many people are happy with the current IPv4 + NAT insanity that is in place now. Nevermind the fact that the insanely ridiculous kludge that is NAT and all of the insanely ridiculous mini-kludges (DynDNS, UDP Connection "Warming", etc.) that currently keep the internet glued together and working (sort of) like it is supposed to work probably cost as much or more time and energy that a multi-year dual-stack IPv4 to IPv6 transition would.

Ok, I'm done ranting.

Have a great weekend everyone! :)

Re:Who gives a $%##?

[kestasjk]

I predict mobile carriers and devices will use it for VoIP, where it's a necessity, everyone else will follow.

Re:Who gives a $%##?

[toadlife]

NAT is *not* a security mechanism.

Th "security" of NAT is a side effect of it BREAKING the peer to peer model of the internet.

The IETF screwed the pooch on this one

[possible]

As I understand it, it is not sufficient to simply ignoring the rthdr0 headers. To protect the infrastructure, the safest thing is for all implementations to immediately DROP any packets containing these headers to keep them from propagating further.

However, there are still people in the IETF who don't want to recognize the severity of their mistake. Why do we, as a community of implementors and consumers, continue to trust these guys as a protocol standards body? It is obvious that they don't understand how complexity is the enemy of security. They add features to protocols without any concrete examples of how the feature would be used, simply because they don't ever want to make a decision. Rather than saying "No, this feature is not worth the extra complexity, we are not going to include it", it is always "OK, we will allow this as an optional mode of operation".

In this case, this was done in a particularly egregious fashion, considering the security issues with source routing have been known since at least '93 or so (in IPv4).

Re:The IETF screwed the pooch on this one

[Trepalium]

Standards bodies attract certain types of people, and it's no real surprise that the IETF is infested with them now. Read an ITU standard some day if you want to know how bad it can be. There's a reason why we use TCP/IP instead of the OSI protocol, why we use SMTP instead of X.400, LDAP instead of X.500, etc. For a rather depressing story about standards bodies, read the Wikipedia article about ATM about the choice of 48-byte payloads. I seriously doubt the IETF will ever be able to exercise these people from it's midst. Many of them were placed there to represent the interests of a particular corporation. Even if you replace the IETF with another standards organization, these same people would simply be moved into that organization.

Re:How many people use IPv6

[jguthrie]

I've been using IPv6 for nearly a decade, but most of the IPv6 traffic on my LAN is local to the LAN. There are very few interesting places on the Internet that have IPv6 addresses and fewer end users coming from IPv6 capable nodes.

The Japanese?

[jd]

They already deploy IPv6 nationally. Just because the US domestic market is more sluggish than a salted slug, it would be wrong to assume everyone else is as bad.

What's more, IPv4+NAT (as standard) doesn't give you half the features of IPv6. I've listed them before, I'll list them again here. Sure, not many use them NOW, but most of these are major areas of growth and Internet-aware devices will (sooner or later) have to use IPv6 to get the support they need.

• IPSec
• Anycasting
• Multicasting the ISPs can't turn off
• Mobile IP
• Mobile Networks
• Extensible Headers
• Router Discovery
• Automatic Configuration
• Per-destination MTU optimization

There are probably a whole bunch of other advantages not listed here. Go to your local USAGI dealership and test drive an IPv6 today.

Re:NOT COOL.

[ObjetDart]

I'm an American.

I know where Estonia is.

I, like a significant percentage of my fellow citizens, do not support Bush, his administration, nor the neo-con obsession with war-as-a-solution-to-everything.

You sound like a bigot and I resent your smug stereotyping of Americans.

Re:NOT COOL.

[QuickFox]

You're right. I'm sorry. Sometimes frustration makes me overreact. My reaction was stupid. It's not the American people I'm frustrated with, it's the Bush administration. It does irk me that the American people re-elected such a destructive administration, but they were swayed by very skillful propaganda. It's no excuse for my stupidly generalizing outburst.

You're right. I'm sorry.

Re:NOT COOL.

[hardburn]

Quick! Find Liechtenstein on a map. How about San Marino? No cheating with Google Maps.

There are a lot of countries and even more cultures within countries. Nobody can be expected to know all of them. While many Americans should be ashamed of not being able to find Iraq on a map, plenty of other countries play a much smaller role in world politics and nobody should blame anyone for not knowing about them.