Re: NIST IPv6 document

["Dobbins, Roland" <rdobbins () arbor net>]

On Jan 6, 2011, at 11:16 AM, George Bonser wrote:

> I thought the entire notion of actually getting to a host was orthogonal to the discussion as that wasn't the point.  
> It wasn't about
> exploitation of anything on the host, the discussion was about the act of scanning a network itself being the problem.

That's a separate sub-thread.  

Joe was specifically talking about sparse addressing as a way to keep the attackers from finding end-hosts.  My view is 
that a) nothing will keep the attackers from finding the end-hosts, b) they'll scan, anyways, c) they'd do hinted 
scanning (DNS/whois/routing tables) which will have its own negative second-order effects, and therefore c) the 
scanning issue in terms of endpoint security is a red herring.

> If network devices can be degraded simply by scanning the network, it is going to become *very* commonplace.

They already can be, and it's going to become more commonplace as a DoS attack vector, concur w/you 100%.

>  But the sets of problems are different for an end user network vs. a service provider network.  For a transit link 
> you might disable ND and configure static neighbors which would inoculate that link from such a neighbor table 
> exhaustion attack.

If you're using /64s for your p2p links, the router's still been turned into a sinkhole, though.

> For an end network, the problems are different.

Concur again.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins () arbor net> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com>

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid, with millions
of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but
just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

                          -- Alan Kay