Gsoc 2011 idea about IPv6

[许伟林 <mzweilin () gmail com>]

Hi all,
    I'm a college student from Beijing, China. This is my 3rd year of
computer science. I'm very interested in nmap so I would like to apply for
the Gsoc 2011 program.
    Actually, I have been researching IPv6 in part time for half a year and
got some experiences. Last November, I helped Simon Kelley improve a feature
of Dnsmasq about IPv6 DNS. (Mail-subject named 'Modification to the feature
of config-static DNS    record in dual-stack network.' in
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2010q4/subject.html).

    In addition, my team has created a open-source project 'stateful
IPv6-to-IPv6 Network Address Translation (NAPT66)' last month in
http://code.google.com/p/napt66/. NAPT66 has been deployed in several types
of middle-box routers and Chinese people can use it to reduce the expensive
cost of accessing Internet.
    I have read the 6 required items of IPv6 support carefully, and got some
ideas.
    For the first 5 items, are the basic theories the same to IPv4's ways?
    For the 6th item about IPv6 host discovery, I think we have more than
two ways to handle this problem.
    First, we can used a public BGP information to narrow down the IPv6
address space so that 2^128 times of scanning are not necessary.
    Second, we can use the worm's technique to discover all active hosts in
a subnet. I recently read a paper about worm exploiting IPv6 network. (A new
worm exploiting IPv6 and IPv4-IPv6 dual-stack networks: experiment,
modeling, simulation, and
defense<http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5274918>)
It involves a host discovery technique based on the Duplicate Address
Detection (DAD) mechanism of the stateless address autoconfiguration method.
By sending a spurious Router Advertisement packet and listening all Neighbor
Solicitation packets, we could collect all active hosts in the same subnet
within 0.5s. The theory is simple but we must find a way to avoid disturbing
the network accessing since the wrong router information may cause the hosts
offline.
    I'm looking forward to seeing more discussions about IPv6 support.
--
The 6 lacking features of IPv6 support:
    1. OS Detection is not supported
    2. TCP connect scan is supported, but the raw packet scans (TCP SYN
scan, UDP scan, etc.) are not
    3. The raw packet host discovery types are not supported (even the
ICMPv6 echo request ("ping") packet is not supported)
    4. Traceroute is not supported
    5. Many NSE scripts have not been tested against IPv6 applications, and
some surely don't work properly in that case.
    6. While brute force ping scanning of IPv4 address space is extremely
common, it is generally not feasible for IPv6 because even end users are
usually assigned 18 quintillion addresses. Therefore we need to research and
develop more effective host discovery techniques for IPv6.


-- 
Regards
Xu Weilin
Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications
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