A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries. RFC 6583 Title: Operational Neighbor Discovery Problems Author: I. Gashinsky, J. Jaeggli, W. Kumari Status: Informational Stream: IETF Date: March 2012 Mailbox: igor@yahoo-inc.com, jjaeggli@zynga.com, warren@kumari.net Pages: 12 Characters: 29480 Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso: None I-D Tag: draft-ietf-v6ops-v6nd-problems-04.txt URL: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6583.txt In IPv4, subnets are generally small, made just large enough to cover the actual number of machines on the subnet. In contrast, the default IPv6 subnet size is a /64, a number so large it covers trillions of addresses, the overwhelming number of which will be unassigned. Consequently, simplistic implementations of Neighbor Discovery (ND) can be vulnerable to deliberate or accidental denial of service (DoS), whereby they attempt to perform address resolution for large numbers of unassigned addresses. Such denial-of-service attacks can be launched intentionally (by an attacker) or result from legitimate operational tools or accident conditions. As a result of these vulnerabilities, new devices may not be able to "join" a network, it may be impossible to establish new IPv6 flows, and existing IPv6 transported flows may be interrupted. This document describes the potential for DoS in detail and suggests possible implementation improvements as well as operational mitigation techniques that can, in some cases, be used to protect against or at least alleviate the impact of such attacks. [STANDARDS-TRACK] This document is a product of the IPv6 Operations Working Group of the IETF. INFORMATIONAL: This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. This announcement is sent to the IETF-Announce and rfc-dist lists. To subscribe or unsubscribe, see http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce http://mailman.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-dist For searching the RFC series, see http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcsearch.html. For downloading RFCs, see http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html. Requests for special distribution should be addressed to either the author of the RFC in question, or to rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org. Unless specifically noted otherwise on the RFC itself, all RFCs are for unlimited distribution. The RFC Editor Team Association Management Solutions, LLC