Use of the IPv6 Flow Label as a Transport-Layer Nonce to Defend Against Off-Path Spoofing Attacks
Steven J. Blake · 2009
TCP and other transport-layer protocols are vulnerable to spoofing attacks from off-path hosts. These attacks can be prevented through the use of cryptographic authentication. However, it is difficult to use cryptographic authentication in all circumstances. A variety of obfuscation techniques -- such as initial sequence number randomization and source port randomization -- increase the effort required of an attacker to successfully spoof the packet header fields which uniquely identify a transport connection. This memo proposes the use of the IPv6 Flow Label field as a random, per- connection nonce value, to add entropy to the set of packet header fields used to identify a transport connection. This mechanism is easily implementable, allows for incremental deployment, and is fully compliant with the rules for Flow Label use defined in RFC 3697.