Thursday, October 25, 2012

IPv6 InSecurity. Is your company ready for IPv6?

Everybody is announcing that IPv4 addresses are running out. Countries and major IT companies (such as Google) are encouraging others to move into IPv6. IPv6 have always been portrayed to be more secured than IPv4.

Image from Google

But in the recent talk by van Hauser on "IPv6 Insecurity" in HITB, he share that there are huge grow in the number of vulnerabilities found related to IPv6 in recent years. Several times more than IPv4.

So is IPv6 mature/stable enough? Do you think companies are ready for the change to IPv6? Should we be encouraging our companies to make the change now? These are the questions that I think we need to ask ourselves as a security professional.

Beside worrying about the readiness of IPv6, van Hauser also highlighted the importance for companies (even those in pure IPv4 environment) to be aware and understand the threats from IPv6. Desktop and network devices these days may already support IPv6 and may enabled by default. Attackers may use these "channel" to target companies in IPv4 environment and bypass their network protection (e.g IPS), which is not IPv6 aware.

Related articles:
- HITB slides: Marc Heuse - IPv6 Insecurity Revolutions.pdf