This page hosts an implementation of CGA & SEND that works on Linux. It is part of the ANR founded MobiSEND project.

The Neighbor Discovery protocol (RFC4861 and RFC4862) for IPv6 which is equivalent to [IPv4 ARP][RFC826], is prone to many different attacks. RFC 3756 describes and categorizes these attacks. Well aware of this issue, the IETF developped an extension to the Neighbor Discovery protocol. It is named Secure Neighbor Discover (SEND). It relies on a new format of IPV6 addresses described in RFC3972 named Cryptographically Generated Addresses (CGA). A CGA address securely binds a Public Key to an address. SEND further completes the mechanism and carries new Neighbor Discovery options (Nonce, RSA Signature, ...), that allow the node to prove its address ownership (thus preventing address spoofing) and that the content of the message is unaltered.

The implementation is currently limited to Linux platform due to its dependency to the [iproute2] (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2), ip6tables and netfiter queue utilities. However, with changes related to the aforementioned parts, we believe this implementation could be ported to others platforms (like the *BSDs).

Please note: the implementation in itself is much more a Proof-of-Concept code than a production-ready software. You should not use it in critical environments. It is now mostly in maintenance mode: meaning that if you come to me with a problem and a patch for it, I'll apply it, otherwise I'll try to help as I can (in the limited free time I have).

When a Neighbor Discovery message (i.e. an ICMPv6 packet) is received or is emitted on/by an interface, a hook set by ip6tables redirect the packet to the userspace before it goes to the kernel/network card. This extraction is performed by the libnetfilter_queue. We then use a modified version of scapy6 (Arnaud Ebalard added SEND messages format, CGA generation procedure and X.509 certificate processing to the original scapy6). Scapy6 dissects each intercepted messages. We inspect each "important" field and decide if we need to modify the message (add an RSA signature option for outgoing packets) or let the message pass (for ingoing packet with a correct signature).

Each assigned address is bound to a Public Key/Private Key. Whenever a message comes from this address, the implementation uses the Private Key and adds an RSA signature option to it.

This software depends on:

• Python >= 2.5
• OpenSSL (ECC suppport in NDprotector version > 0.4 requires at least version 1.0 of OpenSSL)
• Ip6tables
• libnetfilter_queue library
• Python's libnetfilter_queue bindings (NDprotector version > 0.3 requires at least version 0.3 of libnetfilter_queue bindings)

All of these can be prepackaged on your distribution. For exemple, on Debian and Ubuntu:

	$ apt-get install openssl iptables \
	     libnetfilter-queue-dev \
	     nfqueue-bindings-python

Optionally, you may want to install:

• OpenSSL with the support of RFC3779 (see the INSTALL.txt file for details on a quick hack to enable this support). On Gentoo, there is a USE flag that enable the RFC 3779 support (the name of the flag is rfc3779)

A word of caution: some distributions (like OpenSuse 10.2 version) disable IPv6 support when shipping Python. It breaks this program as we are relying on IPv6 features to make everything work.

• 0.5:

  • extended support of the Signature Algorithm Agility (draft-cheneau-csi-cga-pk-agility)
  • improves the code for key format detection (mainly ECC improvements)
  • some bug fixes

• 0.4:

  • huge change in the code architecture that provides performance boost
  • support of Signature Algorithm Agility (draft-cheneau-csi-send-sig-agility and draft-cheneau-csi-ecc-sig-agility)
  • a tool to generate CGA address for the configuration file (genCGA.py)
  • bug fixes

• 0.3:

  • better handling of the transitionnal mode (mixing secured nodes with unsecured nodes)
  • addresses assigned through SLAAC (RFC 4862) can now access /deprecated/ state
  • various bug fixes

• 0.2: Initial version

This software has no direct access to the kernel space. Which is "good" as we can not crash the kernel. However, it involves that we need to emulate the behavior of some kernel structure, which is not always feasible.

Later improvements may require to add a CGA address support inside the Linux kernel (which can benefit to other implementations as well). In practice, we plan that the CGA parameter data structure could be passed to the kernel so it could assign CGA addresses to specified interfaces.

Due to a lack of specification in RFC 3971, we do not implement the Certificate's CRL verification. This is an ongoing work in IETF's CGA and SEND maIntenance working group. It will be integrated in this implementation as soon as a valid proposal emerges.

The project uses scapy extensions that were developped by Arnaud Ebalard. Scapy is licenced under GPLv2. All other parts of the project are licenced as follow:

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Some other implementations are also available (please report new implementations you may find, they will be added here):

• Cisco routers
• Huawei and BUPT (Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications) released a C code with modification to the Linux kernel.
• NTT Docomo has discontinued support of their historical implementation.
• Easy-SEND a Java-based implementation.

If you run into some trouble while trying to have the implementation working, please have a look at the FAQ.md file. I compiled it from the various emails I received.

You can send me comments at tony.cheneau@amnesiak.org. Please prefix the title of the email by "[ndprotector]" so I can better process it. Better yet, open an issue on Github so that yours comments can benefit others.

• Arnaud Ebalard contributed the scapy6 extensions for CGA and SEND.