Tag Archives: IPv6 Global Unicast Address

IPv6 Crash Course @ SharkFest’22 EUROPE

Fortunately, there was a SharkFest – the “Wireshark Developer and User Conference” – this year in Europe again. I was there and gave an IPv6 Crash Course likewise. Yeah! It’s my favourite topic, you know. 75 minutes full of content, hence the name crash course.

Here are my slides as well as the video recording. If you want a crash course for IPv6, here we go:

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Using Case Sensitive IPv6 Addressing on a Palo Alto

IPv6 brings us enough addresses until the end of the world. Really? Well… No. There was an interesting talk at RIPE77 called “The Art of Running Out of IPv6 Addresses” by Benedikt Stockebrand that concludes that we will run out of IPv6 addresses some day.

Luckily Palo Alto Networks has already added one feature to expand the IPv6 address space by making them case sensitive. That is: you can now differentiate between upper and lower case values “a..f” and “A..F”. Instead of 16 different hexadecimal values you now have 22 which increases the IPv6 space from 2^{128} to about 2^{142}. Here is how it works on the Palo Alto Networks firewall:

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IPv6 Interface ID Structure

While there are many approaches on how to structure your IPv6 prefix into /64 subnets (blogposts, books, talks) there are only a few hints what you can do with the other 64 bits of the addresses, namely the IPv6 interface identifier or IID. To my mind you can put some (but not too much) logic into those IIDs to a) have some structure for your addresses that b) helps you identifying those addresses when seeing them in logs or anywhere else. Hence it is easier for you to remember the IPv6 address behind a name (forward DNS) as well as the host when seeing the address (reverse DNS).

This post just shows the approach I am using in my lab. You might find it useful or you might disagree completely. Anyhow, feel free to comment your experiences or solutions for that. :D I am wondering why there isn’t much discussion about these IIDs at all. Maybe for some good reasons I am not seeing yet?

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IPv6 Renumbering: A Pain in the …

If you’re following my blog you probably know that I am using IPv6 everywhere. Everything in my lab is dual-stacked if not already IPv6-only. Great so far.

A few months ago my lab moved to another ISP which required to change all IP addresses (since I don’t have PI space yet). Oh boy! While it was almost no problem to change the legacy IPv4 addresses (only a few NATs), it was a huge pain in the … to change the complete infrastructure with its global unicast IPv6 addresses. It turned out that changing the interface IPv6 addresses was merely the first step, while many modifications at different services were the actual problem. And this was *only* my lab and not a complex company or the like.

Following you find a list of changes I made for IPv6 and for legacy IP. Just an overview to get an idea of differences and stumbling blocks.

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IPv6 VPN Routing with Dynamic Prefixes

How to route traffic inside an IPv6 site-to-site VPN tunnel if one side offers only dynamic IPv6 prefixes? With IPv4, the private network segments were statically routed through the tunnel. But with a dynamic prefix, a static route is not possible. That is, a dynamic routing protocol must be used. Here is an example of how I used OSPFv3 for IPv6 between my VPN endpoints.

In detail, I have a home office with a dual stack ISP connection. However, this connection has a dynamic IPv6 prefix: After every reboot or lost connection of the firewall, I get a new IPv6 prefix. This is really bad for building a site-to-site VPN to the headquarter. Since I don’t want to use any kind of NAT/NPTv6 with unique local addresses, I am talking OSPFv3 over the VPN tunnel in order to route the dynamic prefix range (global unicast) via the tunnel.

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IPv6 Site-to-Site VPN Recommendations

With global IPv6 routing, every single host has its own global unicast IPv6 address (GUA). No NAT anymore. No dirty tricks between hosts and routers. Great. Security is made merely by firewalls and policies. Site-to-site VPNs between partners can be build without address conflicts. Great again!

However, one problem to consider is the proper IPv6 routing via site-to-site VPNs since both sides now can reach each other even without a VPN. This was (mostly) not true with IPv4 in which both partners heavily relied on private RFC 1918 addresses that were not routable in the Internet. If specific IPv6 traffic should flow through a VPN but does actually traverse the Internet, it would be easy for a hacker to eavesdrop this traffic, leading to a security issue!

The following principles should be realized properly to assure that IPv6 traffic is never routed through the mere Internet when a site-to-site VPN tunnel is in place. Even in a failure of that tunnel. The principles can be applied to any IPv6 tunnels between partners, remote sites, home offices, etc., as long as the other site has its own global unicast IPv6 address space. (For VPNs in which a sub-prefix from the headquarters prefix is routed to a remote site, the situation behaves different. This article focuses on the routing between different IPv6 adress spaces.)

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