A New Mechanism to Secure IPv6 Networks Using Symmetric Cryptography

Abstract

Traditionally, configuring a network interface of a machine requires manual configuration and it’s often a long and tedious job. With IPv6, this configuration is automated, introducing plug-and-play functionality to the network interface. Automatic configuration means that a machine gets all the information it needs to connect to an IPv6 LAN without any human intervention. The IPv6 address auto-configuration process includes creating a link-local address, verifying its uniqueness, and determining global unicast addresses. Checking the uniqueness of an IPv6 address is done by running an algorithm called DAD (Duplicate Address Detection) by the new node. This algorithm uses the multicast communications namely the messages neighbor solicitation and neighbor advertisement. However, this mechanism is not secure. In our paper, we propose a new algorithm to secure these multicast communications using symmetric cryptography. Our method shows its efficiency in terms of execution time and security level.