A First Look At NAT64 Deployment In-The-Wild

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hsu, Amanda, Li, Frank, Pearce, Paul, Gasser, Oliver
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Hsu, Amanda
Li, Frank
Pearce, Paul
Gasser, Oliver
author_facet Hsu, Amanda
Li, Frank
Pearce, Paul
Gasser, Oliver
contents IPv6 is a fundamentally different Internet Protocol than IPv4, and IPv6-only networks cannot, by default, communicate with the IPv4 Internet. This lack of interoperability necessitates complex mechanisms for incremental deployment and bridging networks so that non-dual-stack systems can interact with the whole Internet. NAT64 is one such bridging mechanism by which a network allows IPv6-only clients to connect to the entire Internet, leveraging DNS to identify IPv4-only networks, inject IPv6 response addresses pointing to an internal gateway, and seamlessly translate connections. To date, our understanding of NAT64 deployments is limited; what little information exists is largely qualitative, taken from mailing lists and informal discussions. In this work, we present a first look at the active measurement of NAT64 deployment on the Internet focused on deployment prevalence, configuration, and security. We seek to measure NAT64 via two distinct large-scale measurements: 1) open resolvers on the Internet, and 2) client measurements from RIPE Atlas. For both datasets, we broadly find that despite substantial anecdotal reports of NAT64 deployment, measurable deployments are exceedingly sparse. While our measurements do not preclude the large-scale deployment of NAT64, they do point to substantial challenges in measuring deployments with our existing best-known methods. Finally, we also identify problems in NAT64 deployments, with gateways not following the RFC specification and also posing potential security risks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_04181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A First Look At NAT64 Deployment In-The-Wild
Hsu, Amanda
Li, Frank
Pearce, Paul
Gasser, Oliver
Networking and Internet Architecture
IPv6 is a fundamentally different Internet Protocol than IPv4, and IPv6-only networks cannot, by default, communicate with the IPv4 Internet. This lack of interoperability necessitates complex mechanisms for incremental deployment and bridging networks so that non-dual-stack systems can interact with the whole Internet. NAT64 is one such bridging mechanism by which a network allows IPv6-only clients to connect to the entire Internet, leveraging DNS to identify IPv4-only networks, inject IPv6 response addresses pointing to an internal gateway, and seamlessly translate connections. To date, our understanding of NAT64 deployments is limited; what little information exists is largely qualitative, taken from mailing lists and informal discussions. In this work, we present a first look at the active measurement of NAT64 deployment on the Internet focused on deployment prevalence, configuration, and security. We seek to measure NAT64 via two distinct large-scale measurements: 1) open resolvers on the Internet, and 2) client measurements from RIPE Atlas. For both datasets, we broadly find that despite substantial anecdotal reports of NAT64 deployment, measurable deployments are exceedingly sparse. While our measurements do not preclude the large-scale deployment of NAT64, they do point to substantial challenges in measuring deployments with our existing best-known methods. Finally, we also identify problems in NAT64 deployments, with gateways not following the RFC specification and also posing potential security risks.
title A First Look At NAT64 Deployment In-The-Wild
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04181