An Improvement of Packet Filtering Functions for Tunneling Based IPv4/IPv6 Transition Mechanisms

It will need a quite long time to replace IPv4 protocol, which currently used, with IPv6 protocol completely, thus we will use both IPv4 and IPv6 together in the Internet during the period. For coexisting protocols, IETF standardized various IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms. However, new security problems of IPsec adaptation and IPv6 packet filtering can be raised by tunneling mechanism which mainly used in transition mechanisms. To resolve these problems, we suggested two improved schemes for packet filtering functions, which consists of an inner header filtering scheme and a dedicated filtering scheme for IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms. Also we implemented our proposed schemes based on Linux Netfilter framework, and we tested their filtering functions and evaluated experimental performance of our implementation on IPv4/IPv6 transition testbed. These evaluation tests indicated that our improved packet filtering functions can solve packet filtering problems of IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms without severely affecting system performance.