| SAVI | D. McPherson |
| Internet-Draft | VeriSign, Inc. |
| Intended status: Informational | F.J. Baker |
| Expires: October 13, 2011 | Cisco Systems |
| J.M. Halpern | |
| Ericsson | |
| April 11, 2011 |
SAVI Threat Scope
draft-ietf-savi-threat-scope-05
Source Address Validation Improvement (SAVI) effort aims to complement ingress filtering with finer-grained, standardized IP source address validation. This document describes threats enabled by IP source address spoofing both in the global and finer-grained context, describes currently available solutions and challenges, and provides a starting point analysis for finer-grained (host granularity) anti-spoofing work.
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on October 13, 2011.
Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
The Internet Protocol, specifically IPv4 [RFC0791] and IPv6 [RFC2460], employ a connectionless hop-by-hop packet forwarding paradigm. A host connected to an IP network that wishes to communicate with another host on the network generates an IP packet with source and destination IP addressing information, among other options.
At the IP Network Layer, or Internet Layer, there is typically no required transactional state when communicating with other hosts on the network. Hosts generating packets for transmission have the opportunity to spoof (forge) the source address of packets which they transmit.
Source address verification is necessary in order to detect and reject spoofed packets and contribute to the overall security of IP networks. In particular, source address verification techniques enable detection and rejection of spoofed packets, and also implicitly provide some assurances that the source address in an IP packet is legitimately assigned to the system that generated the packet.
Solutions such as BCP 38 [RFC2827] provide guidelines for one such technique for network ingress filtering. However, if these techniques are not implemented at the ingress point of the IP network, then the validity of the source address cannot be positively ascertained. Furthermore, BCP 38 only implies source address verification at the Internet Layer, and is most often implemented on IP subnetwork address boundaries. One of the difficulties in encouraging the deployment of BCP 38 is that there is relatively little benefit until it is very widely deployed, which is not yet the case.
Hence, in order to try to get better behavior, it is helpful to look for an application like BCP 38, but one which can be applied locally, and give locally beneficial results. The local benefit would provide a reason for the site to deploy, while moving the Internet as a whole towards an environment where BCP 38 is widely effected. SAVI is aimed at providing locally more specific protection, with the benefit of better local behavior and local traceability, while also providing better compliance with the cases dealt with by BCP 38.
It should be noted that while BCP 38 directs providers to provide protection from spoofed prefixes, it is clearly desirable for enterprise operators to provide that protection more locally, and with better traceability. This allows the enterprise to be a better Internet participant, and to quickly detect and remedy problems when they occur. For example, when an enterprise receives a report of an attack originating within that enterprise, the operational staff needs to be able to track from the IP address sourcing the attack to the particular machine within the enterprise that is the source. This both that the information be useable (logging), and that the information be accurate, i.e. that no other machine could have been using that address.
Also, there is a possibility that in a LAN environment where multiple hosts share a single LAN or IP port on a switch or router, one of those hosts may spoof the source addresses of other hosts within the local subnet. Understanding these threats and the relevant topologies in which they're introduced is critical when assessing the threats that exist with source address spoofing.
The aim of this document is to provide some additional details regarding spoofed-based threat vectors, and discuss implications of various network topologies.
The following acronyms and terms are used throughout this memo.
Spoofing is employed on the Internet for a number of reasons, most of which are in some manner associated with malicious or otherwise nefarious activities. In general, two classes of spoofed-based attack vectors exist: blind attacks and non-blind attacks. The following sections provide some information of blind and non-blind attacks.
Blind attacks typically occur when an attacker isn't on the same local area network as a source or target, or when an attacker has no access to the datapath between the attack source(s) and the target systems. The result is that they have no access to legitimate source and target systems.
One type of blind attacks, which we'll refer to here as "single packet DoS attacks", involves an attacking system injecting spoofed information into the network which results in either a complete crash of the target system, or in some manner poisons some network configuration or other information on a target system so as to impact network or other services.
An example of an attack that can cause a receiving system to crash is a LAND attack. A LAND attack packet would consist of an attacking system sending a packet (e.g., TCP SYN) to a target system that contains both a source and destination address of that target system. It would also contain a single value for port number, used as both the source and destination port number. Certain target systems will then "lock up" when creating connection state associated with the packet, or would get stuck in a state where it continuously replies to itself. As this is an attack that relies on bugs in the target, it is possible, but by no means certain, that this threat is no longer viable.
Another form of blind attack is a RST probe [RFC0793]. The attacker sends a series of packets to a destination which is engaged in a long-lived TCP session. The packets are RST packets, and the attacker uses the known source and destination addresses and port numbers, along with guesses at the sequence number. If he can send a packet close enough to the right value, in theory he can terminate the TCP connection. While there are various steps that have been developed to ameliorate this attack, preventing the spoofing of source addresses completely prevents the attack from occuring.
Flooding-based DoS attack vectors are particularly effective attacks on the Internet today. They usually entail flooding a large number of packets towards a target system, with the hopes of either exhausting connection state on the target system, consuming all packet processing capabilities of the target or intermediate systems, or consuming a great deal of bandwidth available to the target system such that they are essentially inaccessible.
Because these attacks require no reply from the target system and require no legitimate transaction state, attackers often attempt to obfuscate the identity of the systems that are generating the attack traffic by spoofing the source IP address of the attacking traffic flows. Because ingress filtering isn't applied ubiquitously on the Internet today, spoof-based flooding attack vectors are typically very difficult to traceback. In particular, there may be one or more attacking sources beyond your network border, and the attacking sources may or may not be legitimate sources, it's difficult to determine if the sources are not directly connected to the local routing system. These attacks might be seen as primarily to be addressed by BCP 38 deployment, which would not be in scope for this document. However, as noted earlier, deployment of SAVI can help remediate lack of BCP 38, and even when BCP 38 is deployed can help provide useful information for responding to such attacks.
Common flood-based DoS attack vectors today include SYN floods, ICMP floods, and IP fragmentation attacks. Attackers may use a single legitimate or spoofed fixed attacking source address, although frequently they cycle through large swaths of address space. As a result, mitigating these attacks on the receiving end with source- based policies is extremely difficult.
If an attacker can inject messages for a protocol which requires control plane activity, it may be possible to deny network control services at a much lower attack level. While there are various forms of protection deployed against this, they are by no means complete. Attacks which are harder to trace (such as with spoofed addresses) are of course of more concern.
Furthermore, the motivator for spoof-based DoS attacks may actually be to encourage the target to filter explicitly on a given set of source addresses, or order to disrupt the legitimate owner(s) access to the target system.
While poison attacks can often be done with single packets, it is also true that a stream of packets can be used to find a window where the target will accept the incorrect information. In general, this can be used to perform broadly the same kinds of poisonings as above, with more versatility.
One important class of poisoning attacks are attacks aimed at poisoning network or DNS cache information, perhaps to simply break a given host's connection, enable MITM or other attacks. Network level attacks that could involve single packet DoS include ARP cache poisoning and ICMP redirects. The most obvious example which depends upon falsifying an IP source address is an on-link attacker poisoning a router's ARP or ND cache. The ability to forge a source address can also be helpful in causing a DNS cache to accept and use incorrect information.
Self-propagating malware has been observed that spoofs its source address when attempting to propagate to other systems. Presumably, this was done to obfuscate the actual source address of the infected system. This attack is important both in terms of an attack vector that SAVI may help prevent, and also as a problem which SAVI can help track back to find infected systems.
Reflective amplifications attacks, wherein a sender sends a single packet to an intermediary, resulting in the intermediary sending a large number of packets, or much larger packets, to the target, are a particularly potent DoS attack vector on the Internet today. Many of these attacks rely on using a false source address, so that the amplifier attacks the target by responding to the messages.
DNS is one of the common targets of such attacks. The amplification factor observed for attacks targeting DNS root and other top level domain name infrastructure in early 2006 was on the order of 76:1. The result is that just 15 attacking sources with 512Kbps of upstream attack bandwidth could generate one Gbps of response attack traffic towards a target system.
Smurf attacks employ a similar reflective amplification attack vector, exploiting traditional default IP subnet directed broadcast address behaviors that would result in all the active hosts on a given subnet responding to (spoofed) ICMP echo request from an attacker, and generating a large amount of ICMP echo response traffic directed towards a target system. They were particularly effective in large campus LAN environments where 50k or more hosts might reside on a single subnet.
If an attacker wishes to distribute content or other material in a manner that employs protocols that require only uni-directional flooding and generate no end-end transactional state, they may desire to spoof the source IP address of that content in order to avoid detection or accounting functions enabled at the IP layer. While this particular attack has not been observed, it is included here to reflect the range of power that spoofed addresses may have even without the ability to receive responses.
Other Blind spoofing attacks might include spoofing in order to exploit source routing or other policy based routing implemented in a network. It may also be possible in some environments to use spoofing techniques to perform blind or non-blind attacks on the routers in a site or in the Internet. There are many techniques to mitigate these attacks, but it is well known that there are vulnerabilities in this area. Among other attacks, if there are multiple routers on-link with hosts, a host may be able to cause problems for the routing system by replaying modified or unmodified routing packets as if they came from another router.
Non-blind attacks often involve mechanisms such as eavesdropping on connection, resetting state so that new connections may be hijacked, and an array of other attack vectors. Perhaps the most common of these attack vectors is known as man in the middle attacks. In this case, we are concerned not with an attacker who can modify a stream, but rather one who has access to information from the stream, and uses that to launch his own attacks.
Connection Hijacking is one of the more common man in the middle attack vectors. In order to hijack a connection an attacker usually needs to be in the forwarding path and often times employs TCP RST or other attacks in order to reset a transaction. The attacker may have already compromised a system that's in the forwarding path, or they may wish to insert themselves in the forwarding path.
For example, an attacker with access to a host on LAN segment may wish to redirect all the traffic on the local segment destined for a default gateway address (or all addresses) to itself in order to perform man-in-the-middle attacks. In order to accomplish this, in IPv4 the attacker might transmit gratuitous ARP [RFC0826] messages or ARP replies to the Ethernet broadcast address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, notifying all the hosts on the segment that the IP address(es) of the target(s) now map to it's own MAC address. Similar vulnerabilities exist in IPv6 NDP [RFC4861].
Another example of sighted attack is third party reconnaissance. The use of spoofed addresses, while not necessary for this, can often provide additional information, and helps mask the traceability of the activity. The attack involves sending packets towards a given target system and observing either target or intermediate system responses. For example, if an attacker were to source spoof TCP SYN packets towards a target system from a large set of source addresses, and observe responses from that target system or some intermediate firewall or other middle box, they would be able to identify what IP layer filtering policies may be in place to protect that system.
The first requirement is to eliminate datagrams with spoofed IP addresses from the Internet. Identifying and dropping datagrams whose source address is incompatible with the Internet topology at sites where the relationship between the source address and topology can be checked can eliminate such datagrams. For example, Internet devices can confirm that:
Filtering points farther away from the source of the datagram can make decreasingly authoritative assertions about the validity of the source address in the datagram. Nonetheless, there is value in dropping traffic that is clearly inappropriate, and in maintaining knowledge of the level of trust one can place in an address.
Edge Network 1 CPE-ISP _.------------.
_.----------------. Ingress/ ISP A `--.
,--'' `---. ,' `.
,' +----+ +------+ +------+ `. / +------+ +------+ \\
( |Host+--+Switch+--+ CPE +---)-(---+ PE +- - - -+ NNI | )
`. +----+ +------+ |Router| ,' \\ |Router| |Router| /
`---. Host-neighbor +------+' `.+------+ +--+---+,'
`----------------'' '--. |_.-'
`------------'|
|
Edge Network 2 ISP-ISP Ingress |
_.----------------. _.----------.|
,--'' `---. ,-'' |--.
,' +----+ +------+ +------+ `. ,+------+ +--+---+.
( |Host+--+Switch+--+ CPE +---)---+-+ PE +- - - -+ NNI | \\
`. +----+ +------+ |Router| ,' ( |Router| |Router| )
`---. +------+' \\ +------+ +------+ /
`----------------'' `. ,'
'--. ISP B _.-'
`----------''
Figure 1 illustrates five related paths where a source address can be validated:
In general, datagrams with spoofed IP addresses can be detected and discarded by devices that have an authoritative mapping between IP addresses and the network topology. For example, a device that has an authoritative table between Link Layer and IP addresses on a link can discard any datagrams in which the IP address is not associated with the Link Layer address in the datagram. The degree of confidence in the source address depends on where the spoofing detection is performed and the prefix aggregation in place between the spoofing detection and the source of the datagram.
There are a number of kinds of places, which one might call topological locations, where solutions may or should be deployed.
The first point at which a datagram with a spoofed address can be detected is on the link to which the source of the datagram is connected. At this point in the network, the source Link Layer and IP addresses are both available, and can be verified against each other. A datagram in which the IP source address does not match the corresponding Link Layer address can be discarded. Of course, the trust in the filtering depends on the trust in the method through which the mappings are developed. This mechanism can be applied by a first hop router, or switch on the link. The first hop switch has the most precise information for this.
On a truly shared medium link, such as classic Ethernet, the best that can be done is to verify the Link Layer and IP addresses against the mappings. When the link is not shared, such as when the hosts are connected through a switch, the source host can be identified precisely based on the port through which the datagram is received or the MAC address if it is known to the switch. Port identification prevents transmission of malicious datagrams whose Link Layer and IP addresses are both spoofed to mimic another host.
Other kinds of links may fall at different places in this spectrum, with some wireless links having easier ways of identifying individual devices than others, for example.
Beyond the first hop router, subsequent routers may additionally filter traffic from downstream networks. Because these routers do not have access to the Link Layer address of the device from which the datagram was sent, they are limited to confirming that the source IP address is within a prefix that is appropriate for downstream router from which the datagram was received.
Options include the use of simple access lists or the use of unicast reverse path filtering (uRPF). Access lists are generally appropriate only for the simplest cases, as management can be difficult. Strict Unicast RPF accepts the source address on a datagram if and only if it comes from a direction that would be rational to send a datagram directed to the address, which means that the filter is derived from routing information. These filtering procedures are discussed in more detail in [RFC3704].
An obvious special case of the discussion is with an ISP PE router, where it provides its customer with access. BCP 38 specifically encourages ISPs to use ingress filtering to limit the incidence of spoofed addresses in the network.
The question that the ISP must answer for itself is the degree to which it trusts its downstream network. A contract might be written between an ISP and its customer requiring that the customer apply the procedures of network ingress filtering to the customer's own network, although there's no way upstream networks would be able to verify this.
Conversely, if the provider has assigned a single IP address to the customer (for example, with IPv4 NAT in the CPE) PE enforcement of BCP 38 can be on the full address, simplifying many issues.
The considerations explicitly related to customer networks can also be applied to neighboring ISPs. An interconnection agreement might be written between two companies requiring network ingress filtering policy be implemented on all customers connections. ISPs might, for example, mark datagrams from neighboring ISPs that do not sign such a contract or demonstrably do not behave in accordance with it as 'untrusted'. Alternatively, the ISP might place untrusted prefixes into a separate BGP community [RFC4271] and use that to advertise the level of trust to its BGP peers.
In this case, uRPF is less effective as a verification tool, due to asymmetric routing. However, when it can be shown that spoofed addresses are present, the procedure can be applied.
Part of the complication here is that in the abstract it is very difficult to know what addresses should appear in packets sent from one ISP to another. Hence packet level filtering and enforcement is very difficult at this point in the network. Whether one views this as specific to the NNI, or a general property of the Internet, it is still a major factor that needs to be taken into account.
Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) employ DOCSIS Media Access Control (MAC) domains. These share some properties with general switched networks, as described above in Section 4.1.1, some properties with DSL access networks, as described below in Section 4.1.6. They also often have their own provisioning and monitoring tools which may address some of the issues described here.
While DSL subscriber access can be bridged or routed, as seen by the service provider's device, it is generally the case that the protocols carry enough information to verify which subscriber is sending packets. Thus, for ensuring that one DSL subscriber does not spoof another, enforcement can generally be done at the aggregation router. This is true even when there is a bridged infrastructure among the subscribers, as DSL access generally requires all subscriber traffic to go through the access aggregation router.
If it is desirable to provide spoofing protection among the devices within a residence, that would need to be provided by the CPE device, as the ISPs router does not have enough visibility to do that. It is not clear at this time that this problem is seen as a relevant threat.
There are a number of tools which have been developed, and have seen some deployment, for addressing these attacks.
If BCP 38 [RFC2827] is implemented in LAN segments, it is typically done so on subnetwork boundaries and traditionally relates only to Network Layer ingress filtering policies. The result is that hosts within the segment cannot spoof packets from address space outside of the local segment itself, however, they may still spoof packets using sources addresses that exist within the local network segment.
Unicast RPF is a crude mechanism to automate definition of BCP 38 style filters based on routing table information. Its applicability parallels that of BCP 38, although deployment caveats exist, as outlined in [RFC3704].
Much of the work of SAVI is initially targeting minimizing source address spoofing in the LAN. In particular, if mechanisms can be defined to accommodate configuration of port binding information for IP, either to a port, to an unforgeable MAC address, or to other unforgeable credentials in the packet, a large portion of the spoofing threat space in the LAN can be marginalized.
However, establishing this binding is not trivial, and varying across both topologies type and address allocation mechanisms.
Binding of a single Link Layer and Network Layer address to a port may initially seem trivial. However, two primary areas exist that can complicate such techniques. In particular, these areas involve topologies where more than a single IP layer address may be associated with a MAC address on a given port, or where multiple hosts are connected via a single physical port. Furthermore, if one or more dynamic address allocation mechanisms such as DHCP are employed, then some mechanism must exist to associate those IP layer addresses with the appropriate Link layer ports, as addresses are allocated or reclaimed.
For IPv4 the primary and very widely used automated address assignment technique is DHCP based address assignment. Controlling where authoritative information can be sourced, coupled with sniffing and enforcing the assignments is an effective technique, which can in many networks automatically provide sufficient binding information.
For IPv6, there are two common automated address assignment techniques. While there are many variations and details, for purposes of understanding the threats and basic responses, these are Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) and DHCPv6 based address assignment. In both cases, SAVI binding establishment needs to be tied to the state machines for these address assignment protocols, with appropriate message sniffing and enforcement. For DHCPv6 based techniques, it is also necessary to use classification techniques to ensure that responses which are trusted actually come from authoritative sources.
IEEE 802.1x is an authentication protocol that permits a network to determine the identity of a system seeking to join it and apply authorization rules to permit or deny the action. In and of themselves, such tools confirm only that the user is authorized to use the network, but do not enforce what IP address the user is allowed to use. It is worth noting that elements of 802.1x may well be useful as binding anchors for SAVI solutions.
Needless to say, MITM and replay attacks can typically be mitigated with cryptographic techniques. However, many of the applications today either don't or can't employ cryptographic authentication and protection mechanisms. ARP for IPv4 does not use such protection. While SEND provides such protection for IPv6 NDP, SEND is not widely used to date.
While DNSSEC will significantly help protect DNS from the effects of spoof based poisoning attacks, such protection does not help protect the rest of the network from spoofed attacks.
It should be understood that not all combinations of network, service and enforcement choices will result in a protectable network. For example, if one uses conventional SLAAC, in a switched network, but tries to only provide address enforcement on the routers on the network, then the ability to provide protection is severely limited.
As noted previously, topological components and address allocation mechanisms have significant implications on what is feasible with regard to Link layer address and IP address port bindings. The following sections discuss some of the various topologies and address allocation mechanisms that proposed SAVI solutions should attempt to address.
In a strictly static environment, configuration management for access filters that map Link Layer and Network Layer addresses on a specific switch port might be a viable option. However, most networks, certainly those that accommodate actual human users, are much more dynamic in nature. As such, mechanisms that provide port-MAC-IP bindings need to accommodate dynamic address allocation schemes enabled by protocols such as DHCP, DHCPv6 for address allocation, and IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration.
From a topology considerations perspective, when attempting port-MAC-IP bindings, hosts connected to switch ports that may have one or more IP addresses, or certainly, devices that forward packets from other network segments, present traffic that is much harder to make subject to such bindings and enforcement.
The most obvious example of devices that are problematic when attempting to implement port-MAC-IP bindings is that of routers. Routers not only originate packets themselves and often have multiple interfaces, but also forward packets from other network segments. As a result, it's difficult for port-MAC-IP binding rules to be established a priori, because it's likely that many addresses and IP subnets should be associated with the port-MAC in question.
Validating traffic from Prefix-based and multi-address NATs also becomes problematic, for the same reasons as routers. Because they may forward traffic from an array of address, a priori knowledge must exist providing what IPs should be associated with a given port-MAC pair.
Another example that introduces complexities is that of multi-instance hosts attached to a switch port. These are single physical devices, which internally run multiple physical or logical hosts. When the device is a blade server, e.g. with internal blades each hosting a physical machine, there is essentially a physical switch inside the blade server. While tractable, this creates some complexity for determining where enforcement logic can or should live.
Logically distinct hosts such as are provided by many varieties of virtualization logic result in a single physical host, connect to a single port on the Ethernet switch in the topology, actually having multiple internal virtual machines, each with IP and MAC addresses, and what is essentially (or sometimes literally) an internal LAN switch. While it may be possible for this internal switch to help control threats among the virtual hosts, or between virtual hosts and other parts of the network, such enforcement cannot be counted on at this time.
Multi-interface hosts, in particular those that are multi-homed and may forward packets from any of a number of source addresses, can be problematic as well. In particular, if a port-MAC-IP binding is made on each of the interfaces, and then either a loopback IP or the address of third interface is used as the source address of a packet forwarded through an interface for which the port-MAC-IP binding doesn't map, the traffic may be discarded. Static configuration of port-MAC-IP bindings may accommodate this scenario, although some a priori knowledge on address assignment and topology is required.
While the use of loopback addressing or sending packets out one interface with the source address from another are rare, they do legitimately occur. Some servers, particularly ones that have underlying virtualization, use loopback techniques for management.
Firewalls that forward packets from other network segments, or serve as a source for locally originated packets, suffer from the same issues as routers.
Mobile IP hosts in both IPv4 and IPv6 are proper members of the site where they are currently located. Their care-of-address is a properly assigned address that is on the link they are using. And their packets are sent and received using that address. Thus, they do not introduce any additional complications. (There was at one time consideration of allowing mobile hosts to use their home address when away from home. This was not done, precisely to ensure that mobile hosts comply with source address validity requirements.) Mobile Hosts with multiple physical interfaces fall into the cases above.
Mobile IP home agents are somewhat more interesting. Although they are (typically) fixed devices, they are required to send and receive packets addressed from or to any currently properly registered mobile node. From an analysis point of view, even though the packets that a Home Agent handles are actually addressed to or from the link the HA is on, it is probably best to think of them as routers, with a virtual interface to the actual hosts they are serving.
Any topology that results in the possibility that a device connected to a switch port may forward packets with more than a single source address for packet which it originated may be problematic. Additionally, address allocation schemas introduce additional considerations when examining a given SAVI solutions space.
IPv6 introduces additional capabilities which indirectly complicate the spoofing analysis. IPv6 introduces and recommends the use of SLAAC [RFC4862]. This allows hosts to determine their IP prefix, select an IID, and then start communicating. While there are many advantages to this, the absence of control interactions complicates the process of behavioral enforcement.
An additional complication is the very large IID space. Again, this 64 bit ID space provided by IPv6 has many advantages. It provides the opportunity for many useful behaviors. However, it also means that in the absence of controls, hosts can mint anonymous addresses as often as they like, modulo the idiosyncrasies of the duplicate address procedure. Like many behaviors, this is a feature for some purposes, and a problem for others. For example, without claiming the entire ID space, an on-link attacker may be able to generate enough IP addresses to fill the Neighbor Discovery table space of the other L3 devices on the link, including switches which are monitoring L3 behavior. This could seriously interfere with the ability for other devices on the link to function.
Applying anti-spoofing techniques at the host level enables a site to achieve several valuable objectives. While it is likely the case that for many site topologies and policies, full source spoofing protection is not possible, it is also true that for many sites there are steps that can be taken that provide benefit.
One important class of benefit is masquerade prevention. Security threats involving one machine masquerading as another, for example in order to hijack an apparently secure session, can occur within a site with significant impact. Having mechanisms such that host facing devices prevent this is a significant intra-site security improvement. Given that security experts report that most security breaches are internal, this can be valuable. One example of this is that such techniques should mitigate internal attacks on the site routing system.
A second class of benefit is related to the traceability described above. When a security incident is detected, either within a site, or externally (and traced to the site) it can be critical to determine what the actual source of the incident was. If address usage can be tied to the kinds of anchors described earlier, then it is possible to respond to security incidents.
In addition to these local observable benefits, there can be more global benefits. For example, if address usage is tied to anchors, it may be possible to prevent or control the use of large numbers of anonymous IPv6 addresses for attacks, or at least to track even those attacks back to their source.
This memo asks the IANA for no new parameters.
Note to RFC Editor: This section will have served its purpose if it correctly tells IANA that no new assignments or registries are required, or if those assignments or registries are created during the RFC publication process. From the authors' perspective, it may therefore be removed upon publication as an RFC at the RFC Editor's discretion.
This document provides limited discussion of some security threats source address validation improvements will help to mitigate. It is not meant to be all-inclusive, either from a threat analysis perspective, or from the source address verification application side.
It is seductive to think of SAVI solutions as providing the ability to use this technology to trace a datagram to the person, or at least end system, that originated it. For several reasons, the technology can be used to derive circumstantial evidence, but does not actually solve that problem.
In the Internet Layer, the source address of a datagram should be the address of the system that originated it and to which any reply is expected to come. But systems fall into several broad categories. Many are single user systems, such as laptops and PDAs. Multi-user systems are commonly used in industry, and a wide variety of middleware systems and application servers have no user at all, but by design relay messages or perform services on behalf of users of other systems (e.g., SMTP and peer-to-peer file sharing).
Until every Internet-connected network implements source address validation at the ultimate network ingress, and assurances exist that intermediate devices are to never modify datagram source addresses, source addresses must not be used as an authentication mechanism. The only technique to unquestionably verify source addresses of a received datagram are cryptographic authentication mechanisms such as IPsec.
A portion of the primer text in this document came directly from [I-D.baker-sava-operational], authored by Fred Baker and Ralph Droms. Many thanks to Christian Vogt, Suresh Bhogavilli, and Pekka Savola for contributing text and a careful review of this document.
| [RFC0791] | Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791, September 1981. |
| [RFC2460] | Deering, S.E. and R.M. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998. |