Covert6: A Tool to Corroborate the Existence of IPv6 Covert Channels

Covert channels are any communication channel that can be exploited to transfer information in a manner that violates the system’s security policy. Research in the field has shown that, like many communication channels, IPv4 and the TCP/IP protocol suite have been susceptible to covert channels, which could be exploited to leak data or be used for anonymous communications. With the introduction of IPv6, researchers are acutely aware that many vulnerabilities of IPv4 have been remediated in IPv6. However, a proof of concept covert channel system was demonstrated in 2006. A decade later, IPv6 and its related protocols have undergone major changes, which has introduced a need to reevaluate the current state of covert channels within IPv6. The current research demonstrates the corroboration of covert channels in IPv6 by building a tool that establishes a covert channel against a simulated enterprise network. This is further validated against multiple channel criteria

Analysis of security impact of making mShield an IPv4 to IPv6 converter box

info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

IPv6: a new security challenge

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2011O Protocolo de Internet versão 6 (IPv6) foi desenvolvido com o intuito de resolver alguns dos problemas não endereçados pelo seu antecessor, o Protocolo de Internet versão 4 (IPv4), nomeadamente questões relacionadas com segurança e com o espaço de endereçamento disponível. São muitos os que na última década têm desenvolvido estudos sobre os investimentos necessários à sua adoção e sobre qual o momento certo para que o mesmo seja adotado por todos os players no mercado. Recentemente, o problema da extinção de endereçamentos públicos a ser disponibilizado pelas diversas Region Internet registry – RIRs - despertou o conjunto de entidades envolvidas para que se agilizasse o processo de migração do IPv4 para o IPv6. Ao contrário do IPv4, esta nova versão considera a segurança como um objetivo fundamental na sua implementação, nesse sentido é recomendado o uso do protocolo IPsec ao nível da camada de rede. No entanto, e devido à imaturidade do protocolo e à complexidade que este período de transição comporta, existem inúmeras implicações de segurança que devem ser consideradas neste período de migração. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é definir um conjunto de boas práticas no âmbito da segurança na implementação do IPv6 que possa ser utilizado pelos administradores de redes de dados e pelas equipas de segurança dos diversos players no mercado. Nesta fase de transição, é de todo útil e conveniente contribuir de forma eficiente na interpretação dos pontos fortes deste novo protocolo assim como nas vulnerabilidades a ele associadas.IPv6 was developed to address the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, but has not yet seen global deployment. Recent trends are now finally changing this picture and IPv6 is expected to take off soon. Contrary to the original, this new version of the Internet Protocol has security as a design goal, for example with its mandatory support for network layer security. However, due to the immaturity of the protocol and the complexity of the transition period, there are several security implications that have to be considered when deploying IPv6. In this project, our goal is to define a set of best practices for IPv6 Security that could be used by IT staff and network administrators within an Internet Service Provider. To this end, an assessment of some of the available security techniques for IPv6 will be made by means of a set of laboratory experiments using real equipment from an Internet Service Provider in Portugal. As the transition for IPv6 seems inevitable this work can help ISPs in understanding the threats that exist in IPv6 networks and some of the prophylactic measures available, by offering recommendations to protect internal as well as customers’ networks

Tracing Internet Path Transparency

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 688421, and was supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract number 15.0268. The opinions expressed and arguments employed reflect only the authors’ views. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of that information. Further, the opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Swiss Government.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

New intelligent heuristic algorithm to mitigate security vulnerabilities in IPv6

Zero day Cyber-attacks created potential impacts on the way information is held and protected, however one of the vital priorities for governments, agencies and organizations is to secure their network businesses, transactions and communications, simultaneously to avoid security policy and privacy violations under any circumstances. Covert Channel is used to in/ex-filtrate classified data secretly, whereas encryption is used merely to protect communication from being decoded by unauthorized access. In this paper, we propose a new Security Model to mitigate security attacks on legitimate targets misusing IPv6 vulnerabilities. The approach analyses, detects and classifies hidden communication channels through implementing an enhanced feature selection algorithm with a coherent Naive Bayesian Classifier. NBC is one of the most prominent classification algorithm defining the highest probability in data mining area. The proposed framework uses Intelligent Heuristic Algorithm (IHA) to analyse and create a novel primary training data, furthermore a modified Decision Tree C4.5 technique is suggested to classify the richest attribute presenting hidden channels in IPv6 network. The results evaluation showed better detection performance, high accuracy in True Positive Rate (TPR) and a low False Negative Rate (FNR) and a clear attribute ranking

Network-aware Active Wardens in IPv6

Every day the world grows more and more dependent on digital communication. Technologies like e-mail or the World Wide Web that not so long ago were considered experimental, have first become accepted and then indispensable tools of everyday life. New communication technologies built on top of the existing ones continuously race to provide newer and better functionality. Even established communication media like books, radio, or television have become digital in an effort to avoid extinction. In this torrent of digital communication a constant struggle takes place. On one hand, people, organizations, companies and countries attempt to control the ongoing communications and subject them to their policies and laws. On the other hand, there oftentimes is a need to ensure and protect the anonymity and privacy of the very same communications. Neither side in this struggle is necessarily noble or malicious. We can easily imagine that in presence of oppressive censorship two parties might have a legitimate reason to communicate covertly. And at the same time, the use of digital communications for business, military, and also criminal purposes gives equally compelling reasons for monitoring them thoroughly. Covert channels are communication mechanisms that were never intended nor designed to carry information. As such, they are often able to act ``below\u27\u27 the notice of mechanisms designed to enforce security policies. Therefore, using covert channels it might be possible to establish a covert communication that escapes notice of the enforcement mechanism in place. Any covert channel present in digital communications offers a possibility of achieving a secret, and therefore unmonitored, communication. There have been numerous studies investigating possibilities of hiding information in digital images, audio streams, videos, etc. We turn our attention to the covert channels that exist in the digital networks themselves, that is in the digital communication protocols. Currently, one of the most ubiquitous protocols in deployment is the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). Its universal presence and range make it an ideal candidate for covert channel investigation. However, IPv4 is approaching the end of its dominance as its address space nears exhaustion. This imminent exhaustion of IPv4 address space will soon force a mass migration towards Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) expressly designed as its successor. While the protocol itself is already over a decade old, its adoption is still in its infancy. The low acceptance of IPv6 results in an insufficient understanding of its security properties. We investigated the protocols forming the foundation of the next generation Internet, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMPv6) and found numerous covert channels. In order to properly assess their capabilities and performance, we built cctool, a comprehensive covert channel tool. Finally, we considered countermeasures capable of defeating discovered covert channels. For this purpose we extended the previously existing notions of active wardens to equip them with the knowledge of the surrounding network and allow them to more effectively fulfill their role

An adaptive approach to detecting behavioural covert channels in IPv6

One of the most important techniques in data hiding is (Metaferography) covert channel, which recently has shown potential impacts on network and data security. Encryption can only protect communication from being decoded, meanwhile, covert channel is the art of hiding information in an overt communication as a carrier of information. Covert channels are normally used for transferring information stealthily. They are used to leak information across the network and to ex/infiltrate classified information from legitimate targets. These hidden channels violate network security and privacy polices, it is easy to embed but unlikely and almost impossible to be detected. Despite of the obvious improvements in IPv6 components and functionality enhancements, there exist intrinsic security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities have ongoing implications on network security and traffic performance. Hence, they will create insecure environments in business and banking network, information security management and IT security. ICMPv6 is vital integral part in IPv6, as well as IPsec protocol, to mitigate and eliminate covert channels, the RFC standards and controls should be investigated intensively. Furthermore, incomplete implementation of IPv6 nowadays on all Operating Systems has not exposed the realm of this security protocol performance explicitly. In this thesis, we present a novel Hybrid Heuristic Intelligent Algorithm coupled with enhanced Polynomial Naïve Bayes machine Learning algorithm. The framework is implemented in a supervised learning model to detect and classify covert channels in IPv6. The proposed multi-threaded framework acts as an active security warden processing intelligent information gain and optimized decision trees technique to improve the security vulnerabilities in this new network generation protocol. This new approach develops intelligent heuristic techniques for in depth packet inspection to analyse and examine the header fields of IPv6 protocol. Some of these fields are designated by the designer for quality of service (QoS), future performance diagnostic analysis, unfortunately, they are misused by "bad guys and black hats" to perform various network security attacks against vulnerable targets. These attacks cause immediate and ongoing damage to classified data. In order to prevent and mitigate these types of breaches and threat risks, a multi-security prevention model was created. Furthermore, advanced machine learning technique was implemented to detect, classify and document all current and future unknown anomaly attacks. The suggested HeuBNet6 classiffier obtained highly significant results of 98% detection rate and showed better performance and accuracy with good True Positive Rate (TPR) and low False Positive Rate (FPR)

Developing an Advanced IPv6 Evasion Attack Detection Framework

Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent generation of Internet protocol. The transition from the current Internet Version 4 (IPv4) to IPv6 raised new issues and the most crucial issue is security vulnerabilities. Most vulnerabilities are common between IPv4 and IPv6, e.g. Evasion attack, Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Fragmentation attack. According to the IPv6 RFC (Request for Comment) recommendations, there are potential attacks against various Operating Systems. Discrepancies between the behaviour of several Operating Systems can lead to Intrusion Detection System (IDS) evasion, Firewall evasion, Operating System fingerprint, Network Mapping, DoS/DDoS attack and Remote code execution attack. We investigated some of the security issues on IPv6 by reviewing existing solutions and methods and performed tests on two open source Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDSs) which are Snort and Suricata against some of IPv6 evasions and attack methods. The results show that both NIDSs are unable to detect most of the methods that are used to evade detection. This thesis presents a detection framework specifically developed for IPv6 network to detect evasion, insertion and DoS attacks when using IPv6 Extension Headers and Fragmentation. We implemented the proposed theoretical solution into a proposed framework for evaluation tests. To develop the framework, “dpkt” module is employed to capture and decode the packet. During the development phase, a bug on the module used to parse/decode packets has been found and a patch provided for the module to decode the IPv6 packet correctly. The standard unpack function included in the “ip6” section of the “dpkt” package follows extension headers which means following its parsing, one has no access to all the extension headers in their original order. By defining, a new field called all_extension_headers and adding each header to it before it is moved along allows us to have access to all the extension headers while keeping the original parse speed of the framework virtually untouched. The extra memory footprint from this is also negligible as it will be a linear fraction of the size of the whole set of packet. By decoding the packet, extracting data from packet and evaluating the data with user-defined value, the proposed framework is able to detect IPv6 Evasion, Insertion and DoS attacks. The proposed framework consists of four layers. The first layer captures the network traffic and passes it to second layer for packet decoding which is the most important part of the detection process. It is because, if NIDS could not decode and extract the packet content, it would not be able to pass correct information into the Detection Engine process for detection. Once the packet has been decoded by the decoding process, the decoded packet will be sent to the third layer which is the brain of the proposed solution to make a decision by evaluating the information with the defined value to see whether the packet is threatened or not. This layer is called the Detection Engine. Once the packet(s) has been examined by detection processes, the result will be sent to output layer. If the packet matches with a type or signature that system admin chose, it raises an alarm and automatically logs all details of the packet and saves it for system admin for further investigation. We evaluated the proposed framework and its subsequent process via numerous experiments. The results of these conclude that the proposed framework, called NOPO framework, is able to offer better detection in terms of accuracy, with a more accurate packet decoding process, and reduced resources usage compared to both exciting NIDs

An analysis of the risk exposure of adopting IPV6 in enterprise networks

The IPv6 increased address pool presents changes in resource impact to the Enterprise that, if not adequately addressed, can change risks that are locally significant in IPv4 to risks that can impact the Enterprise in its entirety. The expected conclusion is that the IPv6 environment will impose significant changes in the Enterprise environment - which may negatively impact organisational security if the IPv6 nuances are not adequately addressed. This thesis reviews the risks related to the operation of enterprise networks with the introduction of IPv6. The global trends are discussed to provide insight and background to the IPv6 research space. Analysing the current state of readiness in enterprise networks, quantifies the value of developing this thesis. The base controls that should be deployed in enterprise networks to prevent the abuse of IPv6 through tunnelling and the protection of the enterprise access layer are discussed. A series of case studies are presented which identify and analyse the impact of certain changes in the IPv6 protocol on the enterprise networks. The case studies also identify mitigation techniques to reduce risk