Section: Software and Platforms

NDPMon

Participants : Isabelle Chrisment, Olivier Festor [contact] .

The Neighbor Discovery Protocol Monitor (NDPMon ) is an IPv6 implemention of the well-known ArpWatch tool. NDPMon monitors the pairing between IPv6 and Ethernet addresses (NDP activities: new station, changed Ethernet address, flip flop...). NDPMon also detects attacks on the NDP protocol, as defined in RFC 3756 (bogon, fake Router Advertisements...). New attacks based on the Neighbor Discovery Protocol and Address Auto-configuration (RFC 2461 and RFC 2462) have been identified and integrated in the tool. An XML file describes the default behavior of the network, with the authorized routers and prefixes, and a second XML document containing the neighbors database is used. This second file can be filled during a learning phase. All NDP activities are logged in the syslog utility, and so the attacks, but these ones are also reported by mail to the administrator. Finally, NDPMon can detect stack vulnerabilities, like the assignment of an Ethernet broadcast address on an interface.

NDPMon comes along with a WEB interface acting as a GUI to display the informations gathered by the tool, and give an overview of all alerts and reports. Thanks to color codes, the WEB interface makes possible for the administrator to have an history of what happened on his network and identify quickly problems. All the XML files used or produced by the daemon (neighbor cache, configuration file and alerts list) are translated in HTML via XSL for better readability. A statistic module is also integrated and gives informations about the discovery of the nodes and their type (MAC manufacturer distribution ...).

The software package and its source code is freely distributed under an opensource license (LGPL). It is implemented in C, and is available through a SourceForge project at http://ndpmon.sf.net . An open source community is now established for the tool which has distributions for several Operating Systems (Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X). It is also integrated in FreeBSD ports (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/net-mgmt/ndpmon/ ). Binary distributions are also available for .deb and .rpm based Linux flavors.