Stack overflow based defense for IPv6 Router advertisement flooding (DoS) attack

Abstract

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the future for Internet. But still it has some serious security problems e.g., IPv6 Router advertisement (RA) flood. IPv6 Router advertisement (RA) flooding is a severe Denial of Service attack. In this attack using only single computer, attacker can attack all the computers connected to the Local area Network. As a result all victim machines get frozen and become unresponsive. In this chapter, we have described IPv6 RA flood attack in a test environment and its effects on victims. We proposed an effective solution to counter IPv6 RA flood attack by using a stack. The proposed system would use a stack at victim’s machine. All the incoming RA packets would be sent to this stack before they are processed by the system. After regular interval, RA packet would Pop up from the stack and would be sent for processing. The proposed approach would protect from the IPv6 RA flood, detect the attack and also raise an alarm to alert the user. This proposed approach can also be used to counter other DoS attacks with some modification. We have also provided an algorithm and experimental results in this chapter.