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NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

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Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#41
post #9

Slightly off topic but IPV6 is a massive security hole for regular consumers. NATs sucked when you trying to connect to your favorite MMO but that is because they created a default drop rule for all special inbound ports. I was shocked to see that as soon as your ISP switched to IPV6, your host is now directly addressed. As a by product of skipping NAT you are now relying on every machine having proper firewall setti…

Or you could just configure firewall rules on the router and only allow outgoing connections.

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#42
post #26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes beyond that. With IPV4 you have the further protection of private subnets not even routing across the public internet - it’s broke by default, no configuration necessary. Your attack surface is primarily your firewall which admittedly might be an easy target - but not as easy as an unprotected Windows box.

Exactly! Duplicating my point in a thread below to drive your point home: NAT was an added layer on top of firewall rules because inbound ports had to be mapped to a particular host and port since the router would not know which host to send to. This created a default opt out experience because for a port on your machine to get accessed, a packet must pass inbound rules and match a port map table entry.

NAT was created for one reason only: because there weren't enough IPv4 addresses to go around.

Port mapping and connection tracking firewalls were invented in 1989,[1][2] while network translation was created in 1994. [3][4] The private address space was only reserved in 1996.[5] The Firewalls book was published in 1994 (which meant that it was being written in the 1992-3 timeframe).[6]

People were protecting networks before NAT.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(computing)#Connectio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit-level_gateway

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1631

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_PIX

[5] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1918

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewalls_and_Internet_Securit...

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#43
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ISP supplied devices generally are. I don’t really know why people think this is an issue.

Might have learned something today, I always replace the stock router from ISPs. Easy to test, can someone on a cable box try to reach an open port on their host on IPV6 vs IPV4. My belief is that a majority of setups (maybe not HN hackers) will able to hit a host's open port on v6 and fail on v4. NAT is definitely an added layer though.

> Might have learned something today

Yet you continue to speculate about it and spread baseless FUD.

Consumer ISPs supporting IPv6 provide routers blocking inbound access by default. The interface to open IPv6 ports is usually labelled "IPv6 Pinholes" or similar, and you'll find hundreds of web pages on ISP websites describing the functionality -- just as they have pages on IPv4 port forwarding.

The extraordinary claim that ISPs are supplying routers with such a dangerous default configuration requires evidence.

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#45
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have learned something today, I always replace the stock router from ISPs. Easy to test, can someone on a cable box try to reach an open port on their host on IPV6 vs IPV4. My belief is that a majority of setups (maybe not HN hackers) will able to hit a host's open port on v6 and fail on v4. NAT is definitely an added layer though.

> Might have learned something today Yet you continue to speculate about it and spread baseless FUD. Consumer ISPs supporting IPv6 provide routers blocking inbound access by default. The interface to open IPv6 ports is usually labelled "IPv6 Pinholes" or similar, and you'll find hundreds of web pages on ISP websites describing the functionality -- just as they have pages on IPv4 port forwarding. The extraordinary cla…

> extraordinary claim that ISPs are supplying routers with such a dangerous default configuration requires evidence

Its a legitimate expectation and potentially the norm to expect that I can ssh to my desktop with IPv6 w/o configuring my router.

The pitfall comes as a side effect of NAT inadvertently making port access rare.

I am looking for data, inbound blocked ipv6 seems unlikely but I only have anecdotal evidence.

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#46
post #9

Slightly off topic but IPV6 is a massive security hole for regular consumers. NATs sucked when you trying to connect to your favorite MMO but that is because they created a default drop rule for all special inbound ports. I was shocked to see that as soon as your ISP switched to IPV6, your host is now directly addressed. As a by product of skipping NAT you are now relying on every machine having proper firewall setti…

I'm not so concerned. For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday. Another, computers today do come with firewalls that are enabled by default and tricky to disable. Third, the industry really had to start taking memory safety and attack surface seriously after the Blaster/Sasser/MyDoom days. We see another article here on HN every week about another co…

>For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday.

Eh...

-----

We have outlined a number of techniques that scanning worms can use in an IPv6 Internet to locate potential targets. These techniques are equally applicable to the current IPv4 Internet, albeit not as efficient as random scanning. Although “conventional” address-space scanning is prohibitively expensive in that environment, we believe that the diversity of sources we discussed (which is by no means exhaustive) guarantees a rich target set for worms.

---

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/v6worms.pdf

A lot of them do rely on getting that first host infected though, but that's not exactly dissimilar to IPv4 networks as well.

>Finally, having remote desktop shouldn't be a problem if people don't know your password, no? It's not like there is a firewall stopping baddies from guessing your Gmail password.

That actually begs an interesting point. IPv4 allows for services to block use IP profiling to limit an attacker's attempts to brute-force / semi-brute-force a password or other attacks like a DDoS. What would be IT / Security processionals response when an attacker can just jump to another IPv6 address and resume the attack?

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#47

From the recommendations document: > The assigned IPv6 address incorporates media access control (MAC) address information from the network interface and may allow for host identification via interface ID, network interface card, or host vendor. How long has it been since NSA has looked at generally-available OSs with IPv6 support? IPv6 "Privacy Addresses" are a thing that's on-by-default everywhere (and a damn thorn…

Debian 11 VMs that I was setting up last week were getting non-privacy SLAAC addresses. So I am skeptical of how common it is to default to privacy addresses.

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so concerned. For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday. Another, computers today do come with firewalls that are enabled by default and tricky to disable. Third, the industry really had to start taking memory safety and attack surface seriously after the Blaster/Sasser/MyDoom days. We see another article here on HN every week about another co…

>For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday. Eh... ----- We have outlined a number of techniques that scanning worms can use in an IPv6 Internet to locate potential targets. These techniques are equally applicable to the current IPv4 Internet, albeit not as efficient as random scanning. Although “conventional” address-space scanning is prohibitively ex…

I think the best practice is to rate limit by /24 in IPv4 and by /48 in IPv6. That way all the attacker's IPs are treated as a single user. These have corner cases like if the attack is coming from inside the house but they're decent defaults.

Re: NSA CSI IPv6 Security Guidance (2023) [pdf]

#50
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A transition from IPV4 to IPV6 creates a new per device tracking capability that leaks internal network structure. I doubt it. Your load balancers will be the only addresses that will be addressable anyway. Your IPv4 load balancers will also be "leaking" IP addresses.

You're thinking of the server side, not clients.

Clients use random IPv6 suffixes.
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