Enhancing Security and Privacy in IPv6 Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a critical literature survey of security and privacy challenges in IPv6 networks. Although IPv6 was introduced to overcome IPv4 address exhaustion and improve scalability, its deployment introduces risks related to Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC), Router Advertisement messages, address generation, reconnaissance, and operational misconfiguration. The study reviews foundational IPv6 standards, recent IPv6 scanning studies, and operational security recommendations using four evaluation criteria: security effectiveness, privacy impact, deployment complexity, and scalability. Based on this analysis, the paper classifies major IPv6 threats into local-link attacks, configuration-based attacks, reconnaissance attacks, operational misconfiguration, and privacy-related traceability risks. It also compares protection mechanisms such as RA Guard, Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND), IPv6-aware firewall filtering, privacy-aware address configuration, and operational hardening. The findings show that no single mechanism is sufficient to secure IPv6 networks. Therefore, the paper proposes a layered security and privacy framework that combines address privacy, local-link protection, traffic filtering, reconnaissance reduction, and continuous monitoring. Since this study is literature-based, future work should validate the proposed framework through real network environments or testbed-based experiments.