skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Poster: Rough Edges for IPv6 in VPNs
How do VPNs interact with IPv6? Our poster shows that VPNs often leak IPv6 traffic, failing to provide the promised privacy, and VPNs often prefer IPv4, even though IPv6 is available and working. These results use new data from a website for IP identification, coupled with experiments on specific VPN software. We identify the fraction of v6 traffic leaked, and find the root-cause of IPv6 de-preferencing in interactions between address selection in OSes and VPNs.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2212480 2530698
PAR ID:
10661261
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1048 to 1049
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
ipv6 vpn privacy depreferencing
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Twelve years have passed since World IPv6 Launch Day, but what is the current state of IPv6 deployment? Prior work has examined IPv6 status as a binary: can a user do \emph{any} IPv6? As deployment increases, we must consider a more nuanced, non-binary perspective on IPv6: *how much and often can a user or a service use IPv6?* We consider this question as a client, server, and cloud provider. Considering the client's perspective, we observe user traffic. We see that the fraction of IPv6 traffic a user sends varies greatly, both across users and day-by-day, with a standard deviation of over 15\%. We show this variation occurs for two main reasons. First, IPv6 traffic is primarily human-generated, thus showing diurnal patterns. Second, some services lead with full IPv6 adoption, while others lag with partial or no support,so as users do different things their fraction of IPv6 varies. We look at server-side IPv6 adoption in two ways. First, we expand analysis of web services to examine how many are only partially IPv6 enabled due to their reliance on IPv4-only resources. Our findings reveal that only 12.6\% of top 100k websites qualify as fully IPv6-ready. Finally, we examine cloud support for IPv6. Although all clouds and CDNs support IPv6, we find that tenant deployment rates vary significantly across providers. We find that ease of enabling IPv6 in the cloud is correlated with tenant IPv6 adoption rates, and recommend best practices for cloud providers to improve IPv6 adoption. Our results suggest IPv6 deployment is growing, but many services lag, presenting a potential for improvement. 
    more » « less
  2. We introduce new tools and vantage points to develop and integrate proactive techniques to attract IPv6 scan traffic, thus enabling its analysis. By deploying the largest-ever IPv6 proactive telescope in a production ISP network, we collected over 600M packets of unsolicited traffic from 1.9k Autonomous Systems in 10 months. We characterized the sources of unsolicited traffic, evaluated the effectiveness of five major features across the network stack, and inferred scanners' sources of target addresses and their strategies. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    To support remote employees, organizations often use virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide confidential and authenticated tunnels between the organization’s networks and the employees’ systems. With widespread end-to-end application layer encryption and authentication, the cryptographic features of VPNs are often redundant. However, many organizations still rely upon VPNs. We examine the motivations and limitations associated with VPNs and find that VPNs are often used to simplify access control and filtering for enterprise services. To avoid limitations associated with VPNs, we propose an approach that allows straightforward filtering. Our approach provides evidence a remote user belongs in a network, despite the address sharing present in tools like Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation. We preserve simple access control and eliminate the need for VPN servers, redundant cryptography, and VPN packet headers overheads. The approach is incrementally deployable and provides a second factor for authenticating users and systems while minimizing performance overheads. 
    more » « less
  4. IPv6's large address space allows ample freedom for choosing and assigning addresses. To improve client privacy and resist IP-based tracking, standardized techniques leverage this large address space, including privacy extensions and provider prefix rotation. Ephemeral and dynamic IPv6 addresses confound not only tracking and traffic correlation attempts, but also traditional network measurements, logging, and defense mechanisms. We show that the intended anti-tracking capability of these widely deployed mechanisms is unwittingly subverted by edge routers using legacy IPv6 addressing schemes that embed unique identifiers. We develop measurement techniques that exploit these legacy devices to make tracking such moving IPv6 clients feasible by combining intelligent search space reduction with modern high-speed active probing. Via an Internet-wide measurement campaign, we discover more than 9M affected edge routers and approximately 13k /48 prefixes employing prefix rotation in hundreds of ASes worldwide. We mount a six-week campaign to characterize the size and dynamics of these deployed IPv6 rotation pools, and demonstrate via a case study the ability to remotely track client address movements over time. We responsibly disclosed our findings to equipment manufacturers, at least one of which subsequently changed their default addressing logic. 
    more » « less
  5. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) have become an essential privacy-enhancing technology, particularly for at-risk users like dissidents, journalists, NGOs, and others vulnerable to targeted threats. While previous research investigating VPN security has focused on cryptographic strength or traffic leakages, there remains a gap in understanding how lower-level primitives fundamental to VPN operations, like connection tracking, might undermine the security and privacy that VPNs are intended to provide.In this paper, we examine the connection tracking frameworks used in common operating systems, identifying a novel exploit primitive that we refer to as the port shadow. We use the port shadow to build four attacks against VPNs that allow an attacker to intercept and redirect encrypted traffic, de-anonymize a VPN peer, or even portscan a VPN peer behind the VPN server. We build a formal model of modern connection tracking frameworks and identify that the root cause of the port shadow lies in five shared, limited resources. Through bounded model checking, we propose and verify six mitigations in terms of enforcing process isolation. We hope our work leads to more attention on the security aspects of lower-level systems and the implications of integrating them into security-critical applications. 
    more » « less