nanog mailing list archives

Re: NIST IPv6 document


From: Bill Bogstad <bogstad () pobox com>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 10:23:17 -0500

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 5:54 AM, Jeff Wheeler <jsw () inconcepts biz> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 5:20 AM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:
You must also realize that the stateful firewall has the same problems
Uh, not exactly...

Of course it does.  The stateful firewall must either 1) be vulnerable
to the same form of NDP attack; or 2) have a list of allocated v6
addresses on the LAN.  The reason is simple; a "stateful firewall" is
no more able to store a 2**64 table than is a "router."  Calling it
something different doesn't change the math.  If you choose to solve
the problem by disabling NDP or allowing NS only for a list of "valid"
addresses on the subnet, this can be done by a stateless router just
like on a stateful firewall.

Uh, no it doesn't. It just needs a list of the hosts which are permitted
to receive inbound connections from the outside. That's the whole

This solution falls apart as soon as there is a compromised host on
the LAN, in which case the firewall (or router) NDP table can again be
filled completely by that compromised/malicious host.  In addition,
the "stateful firewall," by virtue of having connection state, does
not solve the inbound NDP attack issue.  The list of hosts which can
result in an NDP NS is whats causes this, and such a list may be
present in a stateless router; but in both cases, it needs to be
configured.

Err, almost everything falls apart once you allow a
compromised/malicious host on the local LAN.   If you have
circumstances where this may happen on anything like a regular basis,
you really need all kinds of control/monitoring of traffic that go far
beyond any local NDP overflow issues.

Bill Bogstad


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