This is meant to be the first part of a 3-part series discussing the space & types of IP addresses, with a particular focus on what has changed between IPv4 and IPv6. In this first post I’ll take the audience through a historical tour of some developments within the IPv4 address space.
In a second part I’ll discuss the properties of different types of addresses from a routing and from a security perspective, both in the IPv4 and in the IPv6 space. In the third part we’ll look at the implications of deploying IPv6 in certain networks based on those differences, e.g. “how to handle ACLs and IP address based log analysis approaches in a dual-stack network where systems have one RFC 1918 IPv4 address and multiple IPv6 GUAs?” (for specific reasons the latter two parts might be published on another medium though). In any case let’s start with a brief history of IPv4. The goal here is to understand how we got to the state that we have today.
In some organizations we work with a certain state of IPv6 deployment has been reached in the interim which includes, among others, the following aspects:
the network infrastructure is IPv6-enabled (incl. interface addressing, routing [protocols] and the like).
parts of supporting services (security functions, monitoring, system management) include IPv6 in a proper way.
3rd party providers have been contractually obliged to deliver their services in an “IPv6-enabled” mode (as opposed to only being “IPv6-capable” which was the standard requirement in many RFIs during earlier years).
It might then happen that networking people (who often are the initial motivators for deploying IPv6) in such organizations are stating, when asked about IPv6: “it’s [mostly] done”.
Point is that, alas, this does not necessarily mean that a single service or application is *actually using* IPv6, so while the above certainly constitutes an achievement it might not even be halfway through.
In this post I’ll cover some properties of the Windows Server 2019 IPv6 stack. It is an update of a similar post I wrote on the IPv6 properties of Server 2016 a while ago.
For this reason I will mostly look at the same properties I did at the time (read: at times without providing too much technical background information; that can be found in the other post) and I’ve hence performed the same types of practical tests.
This week Chris and I participated in the RIPE 78 meeting in Reykjavík. Being part of the group was fun as always and we had quite some interesting conversations with peers from (not only) the IPv6 community.
Big thanks to the RIPE NCC team for the smooth organization and for taking care of us!
In this post I’ll provide some notes on talks I found particularly interesting, plus links to our own contributions.
Chris and I will give a tutorial on the above topic at next week’s RIPE Meeting in Reykjavík. In this post (actually this will probably become a small series of posts) I’ll try to summarize some thoughts on IPv6 security in enterprise environments in 2019.
We’re going to cover three main areas:
Why IPv6 Is Different, Security-wise
Traffic Filtering in IPv6 Networks
IPv6 Security in L2 Networks / First Hop Security et al.
Let’s start with the first item. In real-life scenarios the security of “a protocol” – IPv6 can rather be considered a “protocol family” which includes helper protocols like ICMPv6 and MLD (which in turn is implemented by means of ICMPv6 messages) and potentially others like DHCPv6 – might depend on a number of factors:
This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS19 Active Directory Security Track.
Microsoft IT (Secure) Journey to IPv6-Only
Veronika McKillop, Network Architect, Cloud and Connectivity Engineering (CCE)
The speaker, Veronika McKillop, working at Microsofts network infrastructure services, has given a talk about the process of switching a company network from IPv4 to IPv6-only.
Within the talk the following topics were introduced: Dual Stack, Drivers for IPv6, Status of IPv6 in Networks and Security in IPv6 Networks. The talk covers the reasons why a company would like to switch from IPv4 to IPv6. Technics like NAT64 and DNS64 are introduced. The requirements to software and especially drivers to work in IPv6 environments are described. Also the problems to switch from IPv4 to IPv6-only in heterogeneous networks are addressed.
We’re regularly asked to review IPv6 address plans from different organizations and I’d like to share some reflections from such a process currently happening. I’ve discussed a few aspects of IPv6 address planning before; those readers interested please see this post which contains some references.
The organization in question is headquartered in Germany, has ~60K employees and a number of subsidiaries in European countries. They belong to a “traditional industry sector” (so they’re not an “Internet company”, even though they – as the majority of large organizations right now – strive to be one in a few years ;-).
Starting a post, in 2019, with a mention of sth being “IPv4-only” somewhat hurts ;-), but here we go. Recently Manel Rodero from Barcelona asked me the following question on Twitter:
In this post I’ll try to discuss some inherent aspects of that question and ofc I’ll try to provide a response to it, too ;-).
Let’s first think about the main IPv6-related risks (= threats put into a context of relevance) in an “environment [that] is only IPv4”. While some of you might scratch your heads “what IPv6 threats could there be in an IPv4 setting?” I’m tempted to scratch my head: “what could be the reasons to run an university network without IPv6 these days, or to use BIND?” (which I have a strong opinion on, see here or here). But I disgress. More seriously the main reason for the question can be broken down to:
Some years ago Christopher wrote two posts (2016, 2015) about the IPv6-related characteristics of the WiFi network at Cisco Live Europe. To somewhat continue this tradition and for mere technical interest I had a look at some properties of this year’s setting.
There were two SSIDs of interest: a dual-stacked one (“CiscoLive2019”) and one with v6-only plus NAT64 (“CL-NAT64”). For some background on the underlying infrastructure components you might look at this thread by Nicolas Darchis from the NOC or at this tweet from Dominik Pickhardt. Some stats on IPv6 usage at CLEUR can be found here.
While thinking about the agenda of the upcoming Troopers NGI IPv6 Track I realized that quite a lot of IPv6-related topics have been covered in the last years by various IPv6 practitioners (like my colleague Christopher Werny) or researchers (like my friend Antonios Atlasis). In a kind of shameless self plug I then decided to put together of list of IPv6 talks I myself gave at several occasions and of publications I (co-) authored. Please find this list below (sorted by years); you can click on the titles to access the respective documents/sources.
I hope some of this can be of help for one or the other among you in the course of your own IPv6 efforts.
Cheers,
