Welcome to part two of my introduction to IPv6 for pen testers. If you did not read the first part I really encourage you to do so before reading any further. In the next paragraphs we will briefly discuss the different IPv6 address types and cover Link Local addresses in detail.

IPv6 Address Types

In IPv6 there are three different kinds of address:

• Unicast: These addresses are used for direct one-to-one communication. There are global and local unique unicast and Link Local addresses. Global one’s are managed by IANA and right now all are within the 2000/3 network. Local one’s can be used within organisations to for example identify the location of a system and can either use the FC00/8 or FD00/8 network. Finally, Link Local one’s use the FE80/10 network and are only valid for the directly connected network segment. We will dicuss those shortly.
• Multicast: These special reserved addresses in the FF00/8 network are used for one-to-many communication. IPv6 multicast completely replaced the need for broadcasts and are used extensivly during IPv6 operation.
• Anycast: Any unicast address can be used for anycast as soon as it is assigned to multiple systems. Thereby a client automatically connects to the closest anycast server. This enables load balancing on the network layer.

A system in an IPv6 world will almost ever have multiple addresses assigned to its interfaces. For example as soon as IPv6 is used on an interface a Link Local address is generated and assigned, furthermore the network will provide one or more unicast addresses used for communicating with the outside world or the company network.

Link Local Addresses

We will now cover Link Local addresses in more detail. As already briefly discuessed they are automatically generated and are only valid for the directly connected network segment. Any device that claims to speaks IPv6 supports and uses them. As soon as a new device is connected it can be reached using its Link Local IPv6 address. The following steps (based on RFC2464) show how to generate the IPv6 Link Local address from a NIC’s MAC:

1. Get the 48bit MAC address of the NIC
2. Convert the MAC to binary and flip the 7th bit. This is necessary as in the MAC address if set, this bit identifies a locally administrated and thereby modified address. However in the desired EUI-64 format the bit is interpreted in the the exact opposite way, so that a set bit indicates a globally unique address as burned in by the manufacturer (again see RFC2464).
3. In the middle of the MAC address with the already flipped bit add FFFE.
4. Finally, the Link Local FE80 network prefix has to be prepended while filling everything in between with zeros so that a valid IPv6 address is generated.

The following example shows how to apply this algorithm:

1.) Get the MAC address:
a4:52:6f:44:7e:69 => a4526f447e69
2.) Convert the MAC to binary:
10100100 01010010 01101111 01000100 01111110 01101001
3.) Flip the 7th bit:
10100110 01010010 01101111 01000100 01111110 01101001 => a6526f447e69
4.) In the middle add FFFE
a6526fffee447e69
5.) Add the Link Local FE80 network prefix and generate final IPv6 address
fe80::a652:6fff:fe44:7e69

I covered this algorithm in that much detail because it is the first really interesting IPv6 aspect from a pen tester’s point of view. Many systems already have IPv6 preenabled however most administrators only block access using IPv4 firewalls. That means that it is always worth a try to check if a server offers more services using IPv6 than it does over IPv4. To do so you simply ping the server using IPv4 to get its MAC address cached in your ARP table. Then you apply the above algorithm to this MAC and voilá you now have the server’s Link Local IPv6 address ready to be scanned. As I was tired of repeating this steps over and over again a colleage and I wrote IPv4_to_IPv6_address_generator. It is a small python tool that simply automates the above steps and it works on Windows and Linux.

After all that hard work of generating the Link Local IPv6 address we can now connect to the network and the device is ready to be used. If you are interesting if your computer already has IPv6 enabled just use one of the following commands. They will list all your currently assigned IPv6 addresses:

Linux: ip -6 addr
Windows: netsh interface ipv6 show addresses

Summing up we discussed the different IPv6 address types and generated a Link Local address from a NIC’s MAC. In the next post of this series we will take a closer look on IPv6 multicast and why it will completely replace broadcasts. Furthermore we will discuss how Layer 2 address discovery works with IPv6.