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Use of the IPv6 Flow Label as a Transport-Layer Nonce to Defend Against Off-Path Spoofing Attacks
draft-blake-ipv6-flow-label-nonce-02

Document Type Expired Internet-Draft (individual)
Expired & archived
Author Steven Blake
Last updated 2009-10-26
RFC stream (None)
Intended RFC status (None)
Formats
Stream Stream state (No stream defined)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
RFC Editor Note (None)
IESG IESG state Expired
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD (None)
Send notices to (None)

This Internet-Draft is no longer active. A copy of the expired Internet-Draft is available in these formats:

Abstract

TCP and other transport-layer protocols are vulnerable to spoofing attacks from off-path hosts. These attacks can be prevented through the use of cryptographic authentication. However, it is difficult to use cryptographic authentication in all circumstances. A variety of obfuscation techniques -- such as initial sequence number randomization and source port randomization -- increase the effort required of an attacker to successfully guess the packet header fields which uniquely identify a transport connection. This memo proposes the use of the IPv6 Flow Label field as a random, per- connection nonce value, to add entropy to the set of packet header fields used to identify a transport connection. This mechanism is easily implementable, allows for incremental deployment, and is fully compliant with the rules for Flow Label use defined in RFC 3697.

Authors

Steven Blake

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)