File formats:

Status:

INFORMATIONAL

Obsoletes:

RFC 5157

Authors:

F. Gont
T. Chown

Stream:

IETF

Source:

opsec (ops)

Cite this RFC: TXT  |  XML  |   BibTeX

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC7707

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Abstract

IPv6 offers a much larger address space than that of its IPv4 counterpart. An IPv6 subnet of size /64 can (in theory) accommodate approximately 1.844 * 10^19 hosts, thus resulting in a much lower host density (#hosts/#addresses) than is typical in IPv4 networks, where a site typically has 65,000 or fewer unique addresses. As a result, it is widely assumed that it would take a tremendous effort to perform address-scanning attacks against IPv6 networks; therefore, IPv6 address-scanning attacks have been considered unfeasible. This document formally obsoletes RFC 5157, which first discussed this assumption, by providing further analysis on how traditional address-scanning techniques apply to IPv6 networks and exploring some additional techniques that can be employed for IPv6 network reconnaissance.

For the definition of Status, see RFC 2026.

For the definition of Stream, see RFC 8729.