World IPv6 Day on June 8th 2012 is rapidly approaching. It is an exciting and scary reality. For my personal assets, there was a small investment on my part to get everything up to par. My internet provider Comcast is dual-stack ready which is nice because I experienced some serious latency from time to time when using a tunnel-broker (note that other factors probably contributed). You can see more information about the Comcast IPv6 trial and preparation here. First, I had to invest in a new cable-modem as my old Motorola SB1000 was not up to the task. Comcast has created a hardware compatibility list. From the list I decided to go with the Motorola SB6121 as I have had pretty good success with their modems in the past. Secondly you need a device that is capable of filtering and distributing addresses to your internal devices. I am not going into details here, but a Cisco ASA5500 or a home-brew Linux device usually will work quite nicely. The most important part to read into is that you are also filtering v6 IP traffic along with the v4 so you do not have evil-doers sneaker-netting into your network. Your network devices will not hide behind network address translation (NAT). Lastly, keep the images, firmware, or distributions patched and monitor your traffic from time to time. Kind of like a cavity, you usually do not know you have one until it is too late.

My blog has also moved to a dual-stack (Linode awesome service and support) from a tunnel-broker! This was really straightforward to implement as Linode provides some great documentation in their library. As with any setup, you need to filter unwanted traffic from entering/exiting your node(s), Iptables makes quick work of this. In this scenario, I am going with a deny-by-default posture and log everything that is dropped. This is by no means definitive but just a place to get started.

*filter
# Drop everything
:INPUT DROP [0:0]
:FORWARD DROP [0:0]
:OUTPUT DROP [0:0]

# Allow the loopback
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -d ::1/128 ! -i lo -j REJECT --reject-with icmp6-port-unreachable

# All returning connections
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

# Let the web server respond
-A INPUT -p tcp --sport 1024:65535 --dport 80 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp --sport 1024:65535 --dport 443 -m state --state NEW -j ACCEPT

# All SSH session but limit attempt, also see fail2ban
-A INPUT -p tcp --sport 1024:65535 --dport 22 --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -m state --state NEW -m limit --limit 1/min --limit-burst 3 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW -m tcp --dport 22 --tcp-flags FIN,SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j DROP

# Allow ICMP but need to restrict based on type
-A INPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT

# Drop everything else and log it
-A INPUT -m limit --limit 3/min -j LOG --log-prefix "ipv6 input denied: " --log-level 7

# Respective outbound rules
-A OUTPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT
-A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT
-A OUTPUT -m state --state NEW,RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
-A OUTPUT -m limit --limit 3/min -j LOG --log-prefix "ipv6 output denied: " --log-level 7
COMMIT