I-D Action: draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement-01.txt

Internet-Draft draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement-01.txt is now
available.

   Title:   Observations on the Reachability and Evasion of Packets with IPv6 Extension Headers on the Internet
   Authors: Lin He
            Zedong Jia
            Le Gai
            Shenglin Zhang
            Ying Liu
   Name:    draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement-01.txt
   Pages:   33
   Dates:   2026-07-21

Abstract:

   IPv6 Extension Headers (EHs) are designed to provide protocol
   flexibility and support for emerging features, while maintaining a
   concise base header and efficient processing.  In practice, their
   reachability is affected by middlebox handling along the path, and
   their flexibility also introduces security considerations.

   This document presents observations from a comprehensive, large-scale
   measurement study of IPv6 Extension Header path traversal across more
   than 23,000 autonomous systems.  Using a feedback-driven measurement
   framework called 6Travel, the reachability of 11 common IPv6
   Extension Headers is measured over ICMPv6, TCP, and UDP.  The
   measurements indicate a change relative to earlier work: contrary to
   past observations of heavy filtering, specific Extension Headers now
   achieve reachability comparable to plain traffic.  Two distinct forms
   of policy ossification are observed across industry categories,
   together with widespread potential Extension-Header-based firewall
   evasion signatures in nearly 5,000 autonomous systems, particularly
   under TCP and UDP.  These signatures appear consistent with a
   combination of implementation flaws and security misconfigurations,
   spanning both on-path and host-side firewalls.

The IETF datatracker status page for this Internet-Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement/

There is also an HTML version available at:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement-01.html

A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url2=draft-zedongjia-v6ops-ipv6eh-measurement-01

Internet-Drafts are also available by rsync at:
rsync.ietf.org::internet-drafts


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