Challenges with TCP SYN Floods Affecting VoIP Performance Over IPv6

Service Providers are scrambling to offer voice, video, data, and innovative services, such as gaming, interactive TV, and messaging, on a single pipe. At the same time, network equipment is being upgraded to IPV6. But some Real-Time IPV6 Security overwhelms performance due to the application intelligence, which is the rapid inspection of VoIP signaling SIP, H.323 and audio packets, and the prompt opening and shutting of "pinholes" to allow the passage of valid voice traffic over wireless networks.

A firewall enabled for application filtering and IPv6 can drop application performance by a staggering 90 % or more compared to best-case IPV4 results.

Given methods used for IPv6 Application performance:

• Emulate real application traffic -data, voice, and video over tens of thousands of clients and/or servers.
• Measure performance and Quality of Experience with Web pages/s, VoIP call set-up time, FTP file transfer rate, and instant message passing with TCP SYN handshaking signals.

Multiply services over IPv4/v6 must address three additional challenges that will impact network performance and must be handled following DoS attacks. IPv6 approaches can handle these with Network tester configurations.

DoS Attacks

• Must be filtered, including traditional layer 3-4 attacks such as TCP SYN Flood which is ported to IPv6.
• ICMPv6 attacks
• Application layer attacks (such as SIP setup/teardown flood and RTP stream Insertion).
• Application attacks are particularly effective because they degrade the CPU performance.

VoIP Attack Vulnerability

VoIP attack vulnerability simulates DoS attacks to measure impact on VoIP with:

• Traditional DoS attacks (TCP SYN flood, ping of Death)
• VoIP voice insertion-simulate rogue RTP streams.
• VoIP DoS simulates bursts of call setups and teardowns on the same addresses

Performance Challenges

Longer IPv6 Addresses

Firewall rule sets and ACL must work IPv6 addresses. It can degrade performance.

IPv6 Variable-Length Headers

More complex encryption and authentication header sections must be parsed and filtered, and it may also need to perform encryption/decryption or calculation of message authentication codes to be filtered on application-layer headers and content.

IPv6 DoS Attacks

IPv6/v4 and IPv4/v6 tunneling can hide application-layer attacks within complex handcrafted TCP SYN packets.

Triple-Play Methodology

It is a new approach needed to ensure that application-aware devices do not become bottlenecks:

Real-Time Application Performance

Add DoS attacks over IPv6, including SIP setup-teardown attacks. Quantify the reduction in application performance.