Impacts Evaluation of DoS Attacks Over IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol

Abstract

The Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) is one of the main protocols in the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) suite. It provides many basic functions for the normal operations of IPv6 in a Local Area Network (LAN), such as address auto-configuration and address resolution. However, NDP has several vulnerabilities that can be used by malicious nodes to launch attacks, because NDP messages are easily spoofed. Surrounding this problem many solutions have been proposed for securing NDP but these solutions either proposed new protocols that need to be supported by all nodes or built mechanisms that require the cooperation of all nodes. In this paper we overview NDP vulnerabilities and available solutions to overcome their impacts on IPv6 network. In addition a research test bed setup to implement these vulnerabilities was introduced. Moreover attacks that prove these vulnerabilities are implemented on different types of operating systems, Windows and Linux platforms. Three network metrics throughput, delay and resources consumption have been chosen to investigate, analyze and evaluate the impacts of NDP related attacks on IPv6 link-local communication. Overall, the results had shown that performance of Linux based operating system is better than Windows based operating system.