Before his infosec career Graeme was a street performer, then security researcher, now he calls himself a defender. The talk was built around the following sentence: “The infosec industry and community have completely failed to create meaningful change in the behavior of people”.
The following example is a resume of how hacking worked from 1988 to 2017:
Following my work with the FreeBSD implementation of RFC 6980 I was happy to present my work at last week’s DENOG 9 meeting.
To make it available to anyone who did not meet me there and go into some more detail that would have exceeded the boundaries of the talk, I will cover the topic here.
After the preceding work on Windows Server 2016 and the FreeBSD testing, as a Linux user, lover and administrator, I of course wanted to take a look at how different Linux systems complied with the RFC 6980 standard.
Looking at IPv6 deployment graphs like this one it becomes clear that IPv6 still is not widely deployed in enterprise space (the reason for the apparent oscillation in that curve is the difference between working days – where people use their office computers – and weekend where they preferably use their smartphones or their home equipment connected by means of broadband networks).
There’s a number of good reasons for this (in a nutshell: the overall IPv6 architecture is oriented around, and benefits, the decoupling of mostly autonomous, self-organized endpoints from a well-managed/provider-managed network infrastructure which isn’t exactly the operations model many large enterprise organizations have in mind for their networks. also you might have a look at these slides from RIPE74 to understand some of the reluctance to deploy IPv6 in certain companies).
A while ago I wrote a short paper laying out options for an enterprise organization to get global IPv6 address space from the RIPE NCC, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. As I think the topic may be of interest for others, too, I’ve distilled an anonymized version. It can be found here. I hope some of you find it useful.
Last week I had the pleasure to participate at the first RIPE IoT Roundtable Meeting in Leeds (thanks! to Marco Hogewoning for organising it). It was a day with many fruitful discussions. I particularly enjoyed Robert Kisteleki‘s talk on RIPE NCC’s own design & (security) process considerations in the context of RIPE Atlas (at TR17 NGI there was an intro to Atlas, too).
In this post I’d like to quickly lay out the main points of my own contribution on “Balanced Security for IPv6 CPE Revisited” (the slides can be found here).
As you may remember, back in 2014 we published a whitepaper (compiled by Antonis Atlasis) on the support of IPv6 in different pentesting tools. This is almost three years ago and we thought it is time for an update. In short not much has changed. Most of the tools which didn’t support IPv6 are still not supporting it or haven’t got any update since then.
This post will cover the tools where we could identify some progress on supporting IPv6.
As you may know, we published a whitepaper discussing the behavior of different operating systems once they receive IPv6 configuration parameters from different sources two years ago. At that time, the results were quite a mess. We were curious whether the situation is still so “dire” like two years ago. We fired up the lab, updated the tested operating systems and performed the tests again.
To summarize, at least in scenarios were only one router is involved, the results look way more consistent (even cross operating system) then two years ago. So we made progress on this front. Unfortunately, as soon as a second router is introduced into the segment it gets messy and the operating systems do show inconsistent behavior.
Just recently we discussed IPv6 filter rules for NIC-level firewalls (in a virtualized data center) with a customer. I’d like to take this as an opportunity to lay out potential approaches for local packet filtering of IPv6, which in turn might somewhat depend on the address configuration strategy chosen for the respective systems (for the latter you may refer to this post or to this talk from the Troopers NGI event).
Some of this has already been discussed in RFC 4890 Recommendations for Filtering ICMPv6 Messages in Firewalls but that document is from 2007 and things may have changed in the interim.
Let’s start with a quick look at the traffic which might be of interest. We will take a server perspective here, read: which types of IPv6 traffic might have to be accepted by a host/NIC firewall in order to support proper operations? I will discuss the following, with a focus on the implications of filtering them locally:
A Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch running the software “C3560c405ex-UNIVERSALK9-M” version 15.2(2)E4 connecting
A Linux based attacker system running Chiron and
A FreeBSD target system, running different OS versions and configurations and
A Linux based laptop running a control script that remotely performed the necessary tasks on the two machines mentioned above
The main question was: Would the impact on the target system and the possible attacks that were observed with the Windows Server 2016 victim be reproducible on other operating systems? Or would those behave totally differently?
I’m on my way back from the RIPE74 meeting in Budapest. It was a great event: quite a few nice technical talks in the plenary, productive working group meetings and some really good hallway discussions.
Big thanks to the RIPE NCC team for the smooth organization and for taking care of us!
Here’s some stuff I found particularly interesting:
Andrew Alston’s take on “Anti-Shutdown Policies” (slides and video incl. extensive mic discussion)