Design and implementation of an intrusion detection system based on IPv6 protocol

Abstract

Network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) are important parts of network security architecture. Although many NIDS have been proposed, there is little effort to expand the current set of NIDS to support IPv6 protocol. This paper presents the design and implementation of a Network-based Intrusion Detection System that supports both IPv6 protocol and IPv4 protocol. It characters rules based logging to perform content pattern matching and detect a variety of attacks and probes from IPv4 and IPv6.There are four primary subsystems to make it up: packet capture, packet decoder, detection engine, and logging and alerting subsystem. A new approach to packet capture that combined NAPI with MMAP is proposed in this paper. The test results show that the efficiency of packet capture can be improved significantly by this method. Several new attack tools for IPv6 have been developed for intrusion detection evaluation. Test shows that more than 20 kinds of IPv6 attacks can be detected by this system and it also has a good performance under heavy traffic load.