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IETF RFC 6018
IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets
Last modified on Thursday, September 30th, 2010
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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/RFC 6018.
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.
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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
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
scan to detect them. The concept has value in the sense that it is
harder to map the addresses or prefixes out of an attacker's search
pattern, as their presence is more obscure. Harrop's research was
carried out using IPv4 [RFC 791] and yielded interesting information.
1.1. History and Experience
The research supporting this proposal includes two prototypes, one
with IPv4 [RFC 791] and one with IPv6 [RFC 2460]. Both have
limitations, being research experiments as opposed to deployment of a
finished product.
The original research was done by Warren Harrop and documented in
[Harrop]. This was IPv4-only. His premise was that one would put a
virtual or physical machine on a LAN that one was not otherwise
using, and use it to identify scans of various kinds. As reported in
his paper, the concept worked effectively in a prototype deployment
at the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA), Swinburne
University of Technology. The basic reason was that there was a
reasonable expectation on the part of a potential attacker that a
given address might be represented, and there was no pattern that
would enable the attacker to predict which addresses were being used
in this way. CAIA developed and released a prototype FreeBSD-based
Greynet system in 2008 built around this premise [Armitage].
Baker's addition to his concept started from the router, the idea
that the router would be highly likely to encounter any such scan if
it came from off-LAN, and the fact that the router would have to use
Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) or Neighbor Discovery (ND) to
identify -- or fail to identify -- the machine in question. In
effect, any address that is not currently instantiated in the subnet
acts as a Greynet trigger address. This clearly also works for any
system that would implement ARP or ND, but the router is an obvious
focal point in any subnet.
Tim Chown, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton, offered privately to do some research on
it, and had Owen Stephens do a Linux prototype in spring 2010. They
demonstrated that the technology was straightforward to implement and
in fact worked in a prototype IPv6 implementation.
The question that remains with IPv6 address scanning is the
likelihood that the attack would occur at all. Chown originally
argued in [RFC 5157] that address scans were impossible due to the
sheer number of possibilities. However, in September 2010 a report
was made to NANOG of an IPv6 address scan. Additionally, there are
ways to limit the field; for example, one can observe that a company
buys a certain kind of machine or network interface card (NIC), and
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
therefore its probable EUI-64 addresses are limited to a much smaller
range than 2^64 -- more like 2^24 addresses on a given subnet -- or
one can observe DNS, SMTP envelopes, Extensible Messaging and
Presence Protocol (XMPP) messages, FTP, HTTP, etc., that carry IP
addresses in other ways. Such attacks can be limited by the use of
Privacy Addresses [RFC 4941], which periodically change, rendering
historical information less useful, but the fact is that such
analytic methods exist.
2. Deploying Greynets
Corporate IT departments and other network operators frequently run
collectors or other kinds of sensors. A collector is a computer
system on the Internet that is expressly set up to attract and "trap"
nefarious attempts to penetrate computer systems. Such systems may
simply record the attempt or the datagram that initiated the attempt
(darknets/Greynets), or they may act as a decoy, luring in potential
attacks in order to study their activities and study their methods
(honeypots).
To accomplish this, we separate nefarious traffic from that which is
likely normal and important, studying one and facilitating the other.
2.1. Deployment Using Routing - Darknets
One obvious way to isolate and identify nefarious traffic is to
realize that it is sent to a prefix or address that is not
instantiated. If a campus uses an IPv4 /24 prefix or an IPv6 /56
prefix but contains less than 100 actual subnets, for example, we
might use only odd numbered subnets (128 of the 256 available in that
prefix), and not quite all of those. Knowing that the active
prefixes are more specific and therefore attract appropriate traffic,
we might also advertise the default prefix from the collector,
attracting traffic directed to the uninstantiated prefixes in that
routing domain.
A second question involves mimicking a host under attack; the
collector may simply record this uninvited traffic, or may reply as a
honeypot system.
2.2. Deployment Using Sparse Address Space - Greynets
IPv4 subnets usually have some unallocated space in them, if only
because Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) allocates O(2^n)
addresses to an IP subnet and there are not exactly that many systems
there.
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Similarly, with active IPv6 prefixes, even a very large switched LAN
is likely to use a small fraction of the available addresses. This
is by design, as discussed in Section 2.5.1 of [RFC 4291]. If the
addresses are distributed reasonably randomly among the possible
values, the likelihood of an attacker guessing what addresses are in
actual use is limited. This gives us an opportunity with respect to
unused addresses within an IP prefix.
Routers use IPv4 ARP [RFC 826] and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery [RFC 4861]
to determine the MAC (Media Access Control) address of a neighbor to
which a datagram needs to be sent. Both specifications intend that
when a datagram arrives at a router that serves the target prefix,
but that doesn't know the MAC address of the intended destination, it
should:
o Enqueue the datagram,
o Emit a Neighbor Solicitation or ARP Request,
o Await a Neighbor Advertisement or ARP Response, and
o On receipt, dequeue and forward the datagram.
Once the host's MAC address is in the router's tables (and in so
doing the address proven valid), the matter is not an issue.
In [Harrop], the Greynet is described as being instantiated on an
end-host that replies to ARP Requests for all 'dark' IP addresses.
However, a small modification to router behavior can augment this
model. As well as queuing or dropping a datagram that has triggered
an ARP Request or Neighbor Solicitation, the router forwards a copy
of this datagram over an independent link to the Greynet's analytic
equipment. This independent link may be a different physical
interface, a circuit, VLAN, tunnel, UDP, or other encapsulation, or
in fact any place such a datagram could be handled. Depending on the
requirements of the receiving collector, one could also imagine
summarizing information in a form similar to IP Flow Information
Export (IPFIX) [RFC 5101] [RFC 5610].
The analytic equipment will now receive two types of datagrams. Of
most interest will be those destined for 'dark' IP addresses. Of
less interest will be the irregular case where a datagram arrives for
a legitimate local neighbor who has, for some temporary reason, no
MAC address in the router's tables. Datagrams arriving for an IP
destination for which an ARP reply (or Neighbor Advertisement) has
not yet received might also be forwarded to the analytical equipment
over the independent link -- or might not, if they are considered to
be unlikely to provide new analytic information.
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
Analytic equipment, depending on the router to recognize 'dark' IP
addresses in this manner, can easily track arrival patterns of
datagrams destined to unused parts of the network. It may also
optionally choose to respond to such datagrams, acting as a honeypot
to elicit further datagrams from the remote source.
If the collector replies directly, the attacker may be able to
identify the fact through information in or about the datagram -
datagrams sent to the same IP subnet may come back with different TTL
values, for example. Hence, it may be advisable for the collector to
send the reply back through the tunnel and therefore as if from the
same IP subnet. Naturally, the collector in this scenario should not
respond to datagrams destined for 'lit' IP addresses -- the intended
destination will eventually respond to the router's ARP or Neighbor
Solicitation anyway.
One implication of this model is that distributed denial-of-service
(DDoS) attacks terminate on router subnets within a network, as
opposed to stopping on inter-router links.
2.3. Other Filters
An obvious extension of the concept would include traffic identified
by other filters as appropriate to send to the collector. For
example, one might configure the system to forward traffic that fail
a unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF) check [RFC 2827] to the
collector via the same tunnel.
3. Implications for Router Design
The implication for router design applies to the IPv4 ARP and IPv6
Neighbor Discovery algorithms. It might be interesting to provide,
under configuration control, the ability to forward to an analytic
system the arriving datagrams that trigger an ARP Request or Neighbor
Solicit, and then fail to receive the intended response, to an
interface, circuit, VLAN, or tunnel.
4. Security Considerations
This note describes a tool for managing IPv4 and IPv6 network
security. Like any tool, it has limitations and possible attacks.
If discarding traffic under overload is a good thing, then holding
and subsequently forwarding the traffic instead places a potential
load on the network and the router in question, and as such
represents a possible attack. Such an attack has obvious
mitigations, however; one simply selects (in a manner the operator
deems appropriate) a subset of the traffic to forward and discards
the rest. In addition, this attack is not new; it is only changed in
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
character. A stream that would instantiate the attack today results
in a load of ARP or Neighbor Solicit messages that all listening
hosts must intelligently discard. The new attack additionally
consumes bandwidth that is presumably set aside specifically for that
purpose.
The question of exactly what subset of traffic is interesting and
economical to forward is intentionally left open. Key questions in
algorithm design include what can be learned from a given sample (Are
bursts happening? If so, with what data?), what the impact on the
router and other equipment in question is, how that might be
mitigated, etc. Possible selection algorithms dependent only on
state and algorithms typically available in a router include:
o Select all datagrams that trigger an ARP Request or Neighbor
Solicit.
o Select the subset of those that are not responded to within some
stated interval and are therefore likely dark.
o Select the subset of those that are new; if the address is
currently being solicited, forwarding redundant data may not be
useful.
o Select all datagrams up to some rate.
o Select all datagrams matching (or not matching) a specified filter
rule.
5. Acknowledgements
Algorithms for learning about Internet attack behavior by observing
backscatter traffic have been used by CAIDA, University of Michigan,
Team Cymru, and others. Harrop extended them in his research. This
formulation of the notion originated in a discussion among the
authors in 2005. This note grew out of a conversation with Paul
Vixie and Rhette Marsh on Internet traffic sensors; they also made
useful comments on it. Albert Manfredi commented on the distinction
between a LAN (as defined by IEEE 802) and an IP subnet.
Tim Chown [RFC 5157] has observed that, at least at the time of
writing that RFC, address scanning attacks in IPv6 have not been
reported in the wild. However, as mentioned in Section 1.1 above, a
(partial) scanning attack was recently reported on the NANOG mailing
list. Rhette Marsh has suggested the structure of such an attack,
however, and Fred Baker has suggested approaches based on addressing
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
information exchanged by applications. Hence, we believe that such
issues may be relevant to IPv6 in the future, when IPv6 is a more
interesting target.
Tim Chown and Owen Stephens tested the proposal, and made useful
comments that have been incorporated in this text. His fundamental
comment was, however, that "it works".
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[Harrop] Harrop, W. and G. Armitage, "Greynets: a definition and
evaluation of sparsely populated darknets", IEEE LCN IEEE
30th Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2005.
[RFC 791] Postel, J., "Internet Protocol", STD 5, RFC 791,
September 1981.
[RFC 826] Plummer, D., "Ethernet Address Resolution Protocol: Or
converting network protocol addresses to 48.bit Ethernet
address for transmission on Ethernet hardware", STD 37,
RFC 826, November 1982.
[RFC 2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
(IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.
[RFC 4291] Hinden, R. and S. Deering, "IP Version 6 Addressing
Architecture", RFC 4291, February 2006.
[RFC 4861] Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H. Soliman,
"Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6)", RFC 4861,
September 2007.
[RFC 4941] Narten, T., Draves, R., and S. Krishnan, "Privacy
Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in
IPv6", RFC 4941, September 2007.
6.2. Informative References
[Armitage] Armitage, G., Harrop, W., Heyde, A., Parry, L., "Greynets:
Passive Detection of Unsolicited Network Scans in Small
ISP and Enterprise networks", CAIA, Swinburne University
of Technology, December 2008,
http://caia.swin.edu.au/greynets/.
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RFC 6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets September 2010
[RFC 2827] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, May 2000.
[RFC 5101] Claise, B., "Specification of the IP Flow Information
Export (IPFIX) Protocol for the Exchange of IP Traffic
Flow Information", RFC 5101, January 2008.
[RFC 5157] Chown, T., "IPv6 Implications for Network Scanning",
RFC 5157, March 2008.
[RFC 5610] Boschi, E., Trammell, B., Mark, L., and T. Zseby,
"Exporting Type Information for IP Flow Information Export
(IPFIX) Information Elements", RFC 5610, July 2009.
Authors' Addresses
Fred Baker
Cisco Systems
Santa Barbara, California 93117
USA
EMail: fred@cisco.com
Warren Harrop
Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218
John Street, Hawthorn,
Victoria, 3122
Australia
EMail: wazz@bud.cc.swin.edu.au
Grenville Armitage
Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
Swinburne University of Technology
PO Box 218
John Street, Hawthorn,
Victoria, 3122
Australia
EMail: garmitage@swin.edu.au
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IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets
RFC TOTAL SIZE: 21541 bytes
PUBLICATION DATE: Thursday, September 30th, 2010
LEGAL RIGHTS: The IETF Trust (see BCP 78)
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