Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations by Author "Bere, Mercy"

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    Ipv6– network security in polytechnic of Namibia network
    (Namibia University of Science and Technology, 2007) Bere, Mercy
    Increasing demand for IP addresses on the IPv4 address space made the introduction of a new addressing scheme with more addresses inevitable. IPv6 was designed to address the issue of small address space in IPv4. In addition to increasing the address space IPv6 is presumably supposed to increase the security of networks. However, does IPv6 really improve network security? Based on the IPv6 design, it can be argued that IPv6 does improve network security to some extent. IPv6 was designed in such a way that every IPv6 node should support Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), an Internet security standard for protecting communications over IP. The implementation of IPv6 networks is still in its infancy and thus many of its security aspects still need to be thoroughly reviewed and possibly contrasted with highly pertinent IPv4 security issues. Despite its firm security based design structure, research has established that IPv6 may also be susceptible to some of the common IPv4 networks attacks, such port scan attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks and denial of service attacks, as well as to other attacks that are IPv6 specific such as misuse of ICMPv6 and fragmentation attacks. Therefore it can be argued that IPv6 networks are also susceptible to network attacks. However to what extend is IPv6 susceptible? In order to research this, a live IPv4 network was tested for network security and compared to a emulated IPv6 network. As will be discussed in this research, it was found out that both IPv4 and IPv6 networks are susceptible to many types of network attacks.