Biblio

This work presents the proof of concept implementation for the first hardware-based design of Moving Target Defense over IPv6 (MT6D) in full Register Transfer Level (RTL) logic, with future sights on an embedded Application-Specified Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementation. Contributions are an IEEE 802.3 Ethernet stream-based in-line network packet processor with a specialized Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC) instruction set architecture, RTL-based Network Time Protocol v4 synchronization, and a modular crypto engine. Traditional static network addressing allows attackers the incredible advantage of taking time to plan and execute attacks against a network. To counter, MT6D provides a network host obfuscation technique that offers network-based keyed access to specific hosts without altering existing network infrastructure and is an excellent technique for protecting the Internet of Things, IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks, and high value globally routable IPv6 interfaces. This is done by crypto-graphically altering IPv6 network addresses every few seconds in a synchronous manner at all endpoints. A border gateway device can be used to intercept select packets to unobtrusively perform this action. Software driven implementations have posed many challenges, namely, constant code maintenance to remain compliant with all library and kernel dependencies, the need for a host computing platform, and less than optimal throughput. This work seeks to overcome these challenges in a lightweight system to be developed for practical wide deployment.

Moving target defense is an area of network security research in which machines are moved logically around a network in order to avoid detection. This is done by leveraging the immense size of the IPv6 address space and the statistical improbability of two machines selecting the same IPv6 address. This defensive technique forces a malicious actor to focus on the reconnaissance phase of their attack rather than focusing only on finding holes in a machine's static defenses. We have a current implementation of an IPv6 moving target defense entitled MT6D, which works well although is limited to functioning in a peer to peer scenario. As we push our research forward into client server networks, we must discover what the limits are in reference to the client server ratio. In our current implementation of a simple UDP echo server that binds large numbers of IPv6 addresses to the ethernet interface, we discover limits in both the number of addresses that we can successfully bind to an interface and the speed at which UDP requests can be successfully handled across a large number of bound interfaces.