Service Assurance for IPv6 Networks
The time is rapidly approaching when all of the available unicast IPv4 addresses will have been allocated. The implication is pretty grim: Without IPv6's expanded capacity, soon the growth of the current-generation Internet will end: No new networks will be added.
IPv6 was designed more
than ten years ago to address this problem, promising a much larger IP address
space along with a number of improvements to the current IPv4 scheme. While some people expect IPv6 to eventually replace IPv4, the reality is that the two will likely coexist for many years.
Migration
Hurdles
Leading
network operators and government agencies are starting to migrate to IPv6, but
face numerous hurdles including:
- Immaturity compounded by
complexity of IPv6 deployments implies systems are more fragile and
vulnerable
- Larger attack surface means
more opportunities for network downtime and service disruptions
- Lack of effective tools to
test IPv6 networks to ensure reliability, availability and security.
Mu's Solution
Mu
offers a comprehensive solution to help customers streamline IPv6 service assurance. All the service analyzer's modules (Denial-of-Service (DoS), Service Level
Traffic Variations (SLTV; a.k.a. protocol fuzzing), Published Vulnerability Attacks (PVA) and Mu Studio) all offer extensive support
for IPv6.
Since IPv6 is new, neither network operators nor product vendors have had time to master best practices in programming and deployment in native and transitional environments. Even though IPv4 has decades of deployment experience, problems are still discovered fairly frequently. Mu helps organizations methodically find and eliminate potential weak spots in new IPv6 implementations or deployments. For example:
Problem:
Dual-stack deployment complexity introduces numerous opportunities for bugs.
Benefit:
Mu helps to identify and remove both IPv4 and IPv6 weaknesses to ensure reliability, availability and security.
Problem:
The larger address space of IPv6 makes scanning certain IP prefixes more difficult than in IPv4, which also make it much harder to detect distributed attacks and new spoofing techniques over IPv6.
Benefit:
Mu provides rapid identification and detailed auditing of IPv6 weaknesses before they cause costly downtime.
Problem:
IPv6's optional headers are more complex yet contain much of the same semantics as those of IPv4, requiring new (and potentially bug-prone) code to decipher.
Benefit:
Mu automates finding structural as well as semantic flaws across IPv6 implementations in hosts and routers.
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