IPv6 Essentials

5.2. General Security Practices

Standard security practices involve two "triads" of thought, CIA and AAA. The CIA triad includes:

Confidentiality

Stored or transmitted information cannot be read or altered by an unauthorized party.

Integrity

Any alteration of transmitted or stored information can be detected.

Availability

The information in question is readily accessible to authorized users at all times.

The AAA triad includes:

Authentication

Ensuring an individual or group is who they say they are. The act of clarifying a claimed identity. Common forms of authentication include usernames and passwords or ATM card/PIN combinations.

Authorization

Ensuring that the authenticated user or group has the proper rights to access the information they are attempting to access. Common implementations include access control lists (ACLs).

Accounting

The act of collecting information on resource usage. The log of an HTTP server would be a common form of accounting.

Nonrepudiation is not included in the CIA/AAA Triads. Nonrepudiation means a specified action such as sending, receiving, or deleting of information cannot be denied by any of the parties involved.

These security requirements need to be provided by two basic security elements: encryption (to provide confidentiality) and secure checksums (to provide integrity). Suitable combinations of these two elements may then be used to provide more complex services, such as authenticity and nonrepudiation.

There are two forms of encryption that are commonly used. The first is called "Secret Key Cryptography," also termed symmetric key encryption , which requires the sender and recipient to agree on a shared secret (i.e., a key or password) that is then used to encrypt and decrypt the information exchanged. Common symmetric key algorithms are DES, 3DES, IDEA, RC-4, and AES.

The second is called "Public Key Cryptography," also termed asymmetric encryption . An asymmetric encryption algorithm uses a key pair consisting of a known and distributed public key and an individual private key. When a message is encrypted using the public key and decrypted by the receiver with the corresponding private key, only the intended recipient is capable of seeing the encrypted message. This form of encryption can be used to establish a confidential data exchange. If in addition, the message was also encrypted with the sender's private key and then decrypted by the recipient with a corresponding public key, the security services of data origin authentication and nonrepudiation are added. Common asymmetric key algorithms are RSA and ElGamal.

Secure checksums or hash functions often provide data integrity. A hash function takes input of an arbitrary length and outputs fixed-length code. The fixed-length output is called the message digest, or the hash, of the original input message. These hashes are unique and thereby provide the integrity and authenticity of the message. Common one-way hash functions are MD-5 and SHA-1.

The IPsec standard uses a combination of algorithmic choices based on symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, as well as one-way hash functions. This chapter describes the IPsec framework and the security elements in IPv6 and includes a discussion about special issues to be aware of when securing an IPv6 network.