NAT64 discovery

Last week I volunteered to review draft-ietf-behave-nat64-discovery-heuristic, an IETF draft that describes how an application can discover a NAT64 prefix that can be used to synthesize IPv6 addresses for embedded IPv4 addresses that cannot be automatically synthesized by a DNS64 server (look here for a quick overview of NAT64/DNS64).

I am not a DNS or IPv6 expert, so I had to do a little bit of research before starting to understand that draft, and that looked interesting enough to decide to write an implementation, which is probably the best way to find problems in a draft (and seeing how often I find bugs in published RFCs that should be a mandatory step, but that’s another discussion). I installed a PC with the Linux Live CD of ecdysis, and configured it to use a /96 subnet of my /64 IPv6 subnet. After this I just had to add a route on my development computer to be able to use NAT64. I did not want to change my DNS configuration, so I forced the nameserver in the commands I used. With that configuration I was able to retrieve a synthesized IPv6 address for a server that do not have IPv6 addresses, then ping6 it:

$ host -t AAAA server.implementers.org 192.168.2.133
server.implementers.org has IPv6 address 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b

$ ping6 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b
PING 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b(2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b: icmp_seq=1 ttl=49 time=49.4 ms

As said above, the goal of NAT64 discovery is to find the list of IPv6 prefixes. The package nat64disc, that can be found at the usual place in my Debian/Ubuntu repository, contains one command, nat64disc, that can be used to find the list of prefixes:

$ nat64disc -d ipv4only.implementers.org -n 192.168.2.133 -l
Prefix: 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:0:0/96 (connectivity check: nat64.implementers.org.)

When the draft will be published, the discovery mechanism will use by default the domain “ipv4only.arpa.” but this zone is not populated yet, so I added the necessary record to ipv4only.implementers.org so the tool can be used immediately. This domain name must be passed with the -d option on the command line.

As explained above, I did not want to modify my DNS configuration, so I have to force the address of the nameserver (i.e.e the DNS64 server) on the command line, with the -n option. Interestingly this triggered a bug in Java, as when forcing the nameserver the resolver will send an ANY request, which is not processed by DNS64. People interested in the workaround can look in the source code, as usual (note that there is another workaround in the code also related to a resolver bug, bug that prevents to use IPv6 addresses in /etc/resolv.conf).

I also provisioned a connectivity server for my prefix, as shown in the result. If the tool finds a connectivity server associated with a prefix, it will use it to check the connectivity and remove the prefix from the list of prefixes if the check fails.

The tool can also being use to synthesize an IPv6 address:

$ nat64disc -d ipv4only.implementers.org -n 192.168.2.133 69.55.225.91
69.55.225.91 ==> 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b

and to verify that an IPv6 address is synthetic:

$ nat64disc -d ipv4only.implementers.org -n 192.168.2.133 2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b
2001:470:1f05:616:1:0:4537:e15b is synthetic

The tool does not process DNSSEC records yet, and I will probably not spend time on this (unless, obviously, someone pay me to do that).

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