IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets
RFC 6018
Document | Type |
RFC - Informational
(September 2010; No errata)
Was draft-baker-v6ops-greynet (individual in gen area)
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Authors | Warren Harrop , Fred Baker , Grenville Armitage | ||
Last updated | 2015-10-14 | ||
Stream | Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized (tools) htmlized bibtex | ||
Reviews | |||
Stream | WG state | (None) | |
Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 6018 (Informational) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
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Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Ron Bonica | ||
Send notices to | tjc@ecs.soton.ac.uk |
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) F. Baker Request for Comments: 6018 Cisco Systems Category: Informational W. Harrop ISSN: 2070-1721 G. Armitage Swinburne University of Technology September 2010 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets Abstract This note discusses a feature to support building Greynets for IPv4 and IPv6. Status of This Memo This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6018. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Baker, et al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. History and Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Deploying Greynets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.1. Deployment Using Routing - Darknets . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2. Deployment Using Sparse Address Space - Greynets . . . . . 4 2.3. Other Filters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. Implications for Router Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 5. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1. Introduction Darknets, also called "Network Telescopes" among other things, have been deployed by several organizations (including CAIDA, Team Cymru, and the University of Michigan) to look at traffic directed to addresses in blocks that are not in actual use. Such traffic becomes visible by either direct capture (it is routed to a collector) or by virtue of its backscatter (its resulting in ICMP traffic or transport-layer resets). Darknets, of course, have two problems. As their address spaces become known, attackers stop probing them, so they are less effective. Also, the administrators of those prefixes are pressured by Regional Internet Registry (RIR) policy and business requirements to deploy them in active networks. [Harrop] defines a 'Greynet' by extension, in these words: Darknets are often proposed to monitor for anomalous, externally sourced traffic, and require large, contiguous blocks of unused IP addresses - not always feasible for enterprise network operators. We introduce and evaluate the Greynet - a region of IP address space that is sparsely populated with "darknet" addresses interspersed with active (or "lit") IP addresses. Based on a small sample of traffic collected within a university campus network we saw that relatively sparse greynets can achieve useful levels of network scan detection. In other words, instead of setting aside prefixes that an attacker might attempt to probe and in so doing court discovery, Harrop proposed that individual (or small groups of adjacent) addresses in subnets be set aside for the purpose, using different host identifiers in each subnet to make it more difficult for an address Baker, et al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010 scan to detect them. The concept has value in the sense that it isShow full document text