Evaluation of Denial of Service Attacks in Neighbo Discovery Protocol over IPv6

Abstract

The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was developed and would gradually replace the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4). The Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) one of the main protocols in the IPv6 suite providing many basic functions for the normal operations of IPv6 in a Local Area Network (LAN). However, NDP has several vulnerabilities that can be used by malicious nodes to launch attacks, because NDP assumes connections between nodes are safe. Hence, NDP messages are easily spoofed. In this research Denial of Service (DOS) attack is deployed by attacker computer in small virtual IPv6 network with two computers with different types of operating systems Windows and Linux as victims to evaluate the performance of the network before and during DoS attack using three network metrics throughput, delay and resources consumption. They are measured between monitoring computer and victim computers under flooding attack. Overall, the results had shown that both operating system Windows and Linux had been affected by the DOS attack. The performance of Linux was better than Windows in delivering low percentage of the sending packets.