IPv6 Multicast Vulnerability – An Overview

IPv6 is the next Internet Protocol version designed to eventually replace IPv4 as the number of potentially allocated IPv4 addresses is insufficient. The vulnerabilities of the IPv6 protocols and the attacks on them demand more attention be paid. The multicast mechanism is one of the crucial mechanisms related to the IPv6 protocol. Despite its usefulness in performing basic tasks in IPv6 environments, the multicast mechanism is considered 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 attacks that use 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. The results of the severity calculation show that the DoS attack is the most dangerous attack, getting 4.5 out of 10, followed by the reconnaissance attack and the smurf attack which have 2 and 1.5 degree respectively.