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IPv6 is a new protocol of internet was developed by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to replace the existing protocol (Raicu & Zeadally, 2003). Initially, the deployments of previous researches were to identify constraints that may occur in IPv6. Throughout years, Transition Mechanism (TM) has been inspired in order to ensure a successful integration of IPv6 into an existing network (AlJaafreh et al., 2008; Narayan & Tauch, 2010). As referred to (Waddington & Fangzhe, 2002), TMs are identified into three main categories based on their operation and the way of their implementation: dual stack mechanisms (Durand, 2001; Hirorai & Yoshifuji, 2006), tunneling mechanisms (Vazao et al., 2004; Waddington & Fangzhe, 2002), and translation mechanisms (Grosse & Lakshman, 2003; Kawarasaki et al., 2003). Among of these mechanism, tunneling is widest implemented nowadays.
IPv6 mandates the inclusion of IP Security (IPsec) (Kent & Atkinson, 1998; Zagar & Grgic, 2006) makes it is more secure than IPv4. Thus, most of threats that dominate the IPv4 network are no longer effective on IPv6 networks (Xinyu et al., 2007). As a result, some of current security issues can be mitigated in the future implementation. However, after a few years of IPv6 services, some of IPv4 threats have been discovered by researchers at the IPv6 environment (Liu et al., 2009). In addition, the researcher in (Bahaman et al., 2011) stated that this automatic tunneling as a reason for the spreader threats without being detected by intrusion detection tools. Even though, it has been acknowledged by (Deering & Hinden, 1998; Savola & Patel, 2004) about this situation, but the only provide a more theoretical approach on their proposed steps.
As a significant, this paper proposes the possible methods of reconnaissance attack through the medium of 6to4 tunneling. The method focuses on silent mode of reconnaissance attacks; to determine which tunneling interfaces within a subnet are alive. Firstly, the possible method of the attack is review and identified. Then, this method is presented in equation form to understand clearly. Here, the testbed was developed in order to acquire the desired environment. Next, the proposed attacks were constructed and triggered through the testbed. The mentioned attack were carried out using a Python platform tool, Scapy (Burns et al., 2007; Hogg & Vyncke, 2009). At same time packet analyzer was appointed as monitoring and validating function.
The following section of this paper will explain the background of tunneling mechanism and DoS threats. The explanation on methods and testing scenario is detailed in the following section. There will be a further discussion on the experiment in the section afterwards. Then we will further discuss the test results. Finally, the conclusion for this research is explained.