IPv6 Multicast Vulnerability – An Overview

Abstract

IPv6 is the next Internet Protocol version designed to eventually replace IPv4 as the amount of potentially allocated IPv4 addresses is insufficient. The vulnerabilities of IPv6 protocols and the attacks against them demand more attention to be paid. The multicast mechanism is one of the crucial mechanisms that are related to the nature of IPv6 protocol. Despite its usefulness in performing basic tasks in IPv6 environments, the multicast mechanism is considered as a security hole that calls to be understood by the security specialists and IPv6 network administrators. To address the multicast security aspects, this paper presents the attacks that utilize the multicast vulnerability along with the identification of countermeasures for each attack. In particular, this paper analyzes the state-of-the-art attacks and ranks them based on a new severity ranking method to provide significant security guidance for deploying IPv6 networks.