IPv6 Multicast Vulnerability – An Overview

IPv6 is the next Internet Protocol version designed to eventually replace IPv4 as the amount of potentially allocated IPv4 addresses is insufficient. The vulnerabilities of IPv6 protocols and the attacks against them demand more attention to be paid. The multicast mechanism is one of the crucial mechanisms that are related to the nature of IPv6 protocol. Despite its usefulness in performing basic tasks in IPv6 environments, the multicast mechanism is considered as a security hole that calls to be understood by the security specialists and IPv6 network administrators. To address the multicast security aspects, this paper presents the attacks that utilize the multicast vulnerability along with the identification of countermeasures for each attack. In particular, this paper analyzes the state-of-the-art attacks and ranks them based on a new severity ranking method to provide significant security guidance for deploying IPv6 networks.

Mobility Based Key Management Technique for Multicast Security in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In MANET multicasting, forward and backward secrecy result in increased packet drop rate owing to mobility. Frequent rekeying causes large message overhead which increases energy consumption and end-to-end delay. Particularly, the prevailing group key management techniques cause frequent mobility and disconnections. So there is a need to design a multicast key management technique to overcome these problems. In this paper, we propose the mobility based key management technique for multicast security in MANET. Initially, the nodes are categorized according to their stability index which is estimated based on the link availability and mobility. A multicast tree is constructed such that for every weak node, there is a strong parent node. A session key-based encryption technique is utilized to transmit a multicast data. The rekeying process is performed periodically by the initiator node. The rekeying interval is fixed depending on the node category so that this technique greatly minimizes the rekeying overhead. By simulation results, we show that our proposed approach reduces the packet drop rate and improves the data confidentiality.