Subject: [OPSEC] Document Action: 'Network Reconnaissance in IPv6 Networks' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-opsec-ipv6-host-scanning-08.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2015 14:38:41 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Network Reconnaissance in IPv6 Networks'
  (draft-ietf-opsec-ipv6-host-scanning-08.txt) as Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Operational Security Capabilities for
IP Network Infrastructure Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Benoit Claise and Joel Jaeggli.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsec-ipv6-host-scanning/

Technical Summary

IPv6 offers a much larger address space than that of its IPv4 counterpart.  An IPv6 subnet of size /64 can (in theory) accommodate approximately 1.844 * 10^19 hosts, thus resulting in a much lower host density (#hosts/#addresses) than is typical in IPv4 networks, where a site typically has 65,000 or less unique addresses.  As a result, it is widely assumed that it would take a tremendous effort to perform address scanning attacks against IPv6 networks, and therefore brute-force IPv6 address scanning attacks have been considered unfeasible.  This document updates RFC 5157, which first discussed this assumption, by providing further analysis on how traditional address scanning techniques apply to IPv6 networks, and exploring some additional techniques that can be employed for IPv6 network reconnaissance.  In doing so, this document formally obsoletes RFC 5157.

Working Group Summary

No controversy. Document went pretty smooth in the WG

Document Quality

The content is Informational experience and hence require no vendor implementation. 
Personnel

Document Shepherd: Gunter Van de Velde
Responsible Area AD: Joel Jaeggli
RFC Editor Note