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RA Guard (Evasion) – We Stand Corrected

Recently  Jozef Pivarník and Matěj Grégr published an excellent write-up on RA Guard & evasion techniques. Amongst others they tested the “undetermined-transport” ACL we described here and here. As it turns out the “workaround” for implementing undetermined-transport on platforms seemingly not supporting it, causes some bad collateral damage: the respective port does not forward any IPv6 packets any more (this was brought to my attention by Roberto Taccon). We had done some tests after applying it (by means of the “workaround”) but we had just looked at fragmented RA packets (which did not get through => test succeeded). So, frankly: the undetermined-transport trick does not make sense at all on the “unsupported platforms”…

Jim Small didn’t notice this either, in his great presentation at the North American IPv6 Summit (which, btw, to the best of our knowledge is the best overview of ACL approaches to counter common IPv6 attacks on the local link).

Furthermore it should be noted that Jozef and Matej describe some really interesting ways to evade current implementations, incl. an evasion variant merely based on extension headers (without fragmentation) that we hadn’t been aware of before. These will be included in these workshops.

Obviously much more research (and vendor scrutiny) is needed as for RA Guard…

have a great week everybody

Enno

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RA Guard Support

Hi,

on the [ipv6-ops] mailing list currently there’s some discussion about RA guard support on switches from different vendors.

Stefan, one of our students (btw: working on a topic similar to this session), quickly put together a preliminary list, based on publicly available information (read: the WWW ;-)). Some of you may find this useful; it can be found here. Furthermore on the list this link was mentioned which seems to provide some info as well (albeit potentially not very up-to-date).

If anyone of you has better/more information pls feel free to share by leaving a comment. The IPv6 security comment will thank you for that 😉

Best

Enno

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Some more Notes on RA Guard Evasion and “undetermined-transport”

I just had an interesting discussion with Jim Small (who gives the “IPv6 Attacks and Countermeasures” talk at the North American IPv6 Summit next week) about the feasibility of the “undetermined-transport” keyword in PACLs on Cisco 3560 switches (here running  IOS 15.0(2)SE). Actually there’s some kind-of funny behavior as for it on that platform (and there’s even some Cisco documentation stating it’s not supported). Let’s have a look, and start with a quick refresher.

Rogue router advertisements pose a significant security and network stability risk in IPv6 networks. That’s why there’s a security feature implemented on certain switches which is called “RA Guard” (see also here). Unfortunately (at least Cisco’s current implementation of) RA Guard can easily be circumvented, e.g. by using the following command from the THC IPV6 attack toolkit:

fake_router26 -E D eth0

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