As the IPv6 protocol has been rapidly developed and applied, the security of IPv6 networks has become the focus of academic and industrial attention. Despite the fact that the IPv6 protocol is designed with security in mind, due to insufficient defense measures of current firewalls and intrusion detection systems for IPv6 networks, the construction of covert channels using fields not defined or reserved in IPv6 protocols may compromise the information systems. By discussing the possibility of constructing storage covert channels within IPv6 protocol fields, 10 types of IPv6 covert channels are constructed with undefined and reserved fields, including the flow label field, the traffic class field of IPv6 header, the reserved fields of IPv6 extension headers and the code field of ICMPv6 header. An IPv6 covert channel detection method based on field matching (CC-Guard) is proposed, and a typical IPv6 network environment is built for testing. In comparison with existing detection tools, the experimental results show that the CC-Guard not only can detect more covert channels consisting of IPv6 extension headers and ICMPv6 headers, but also achieves real-time detection with a lower detection overhead.

2022 IEEE 24th Int Conf on High Performance Computing & Communications; 8th Int Conf on Data Science & Systems; 20th Int Conf on Smart City; 8th Int Conf on Dependability in Sensor, Cloud & Big Data Systems & Application (HPCC/DSS/SmartCity/DependSys)