An Approach for the Administration and Security of IPv6 Transition Mechanisms: An SNMP MIB for 6to4

A number of transitional mechanisms are being offered to allow the gradual adoption of IPv6 and prolong the useful operating time of legacy systems and applications. The transition mechanisms perform conversions between versions 4 and 6 of the IP protocol, offer tunnelling functionality and act as connection points between isolated (in the sense of IP versioning) network segments. In this paper we examine IPv6 transition mechanisms (focusing in tunnelling mechanisms) and their management requirements. Specifically, we examine in the most widely used mechanism, 6to4. We present its operational characteristics and identify its main management requirements. These requirements are then used to define corresponding objects for an SNMP management information database (MIB). Our aim is to use the SNMP methodology to address the most important IPv6 transition mechanism issues in a unified network administration environment. Our effort has resulted in a working prototype SNMP agent that implements most of our management object suggestions. We briefly describe the implementation challenges we faced and its main operational characteristics