massbind

Massbind is a small convenience lib to handle large range of ip6 subnet addresses (/64 or smaller) and add (or delete) ip6 addresses to a given interface. The ip6 addresses may be picked in a range or randomly.

Linux only.

Rationale

In certain situations is useful to bind to more than one ip address at client or server side. In order to bind to the address, it first has to be added to the interface. At IPv4 times, you were lucky if you had a subnet with some dozen of unused IP's you could assign by hand. With IPv6 you usually get a /64 subnet from your provider/hoster. You can't add addresses by hand any longer. Using massbind, you can pick a dedicated ip6 address for each connection within your program and throw it away after usage.

Note that massbind will actually only add the address to the given interface, you need to bind() to it by yourself program-wise in order to bind to the correct (src:srcport, dst:dstport) tuple.

Alternatives

You could use ip6 privacy extensions, but this is not fine grained enough to pick one address per connection. You may also use IP_TRANSPARENT sockets to bind to non-exsiting addresses and setup your netfilter rules accordingly.

Server-side you can also add an entire subnet to your interface and add routes to the local routing table:

# ip -6 addr add 2019::/64 dev eth0
# ip -6 route add local 2019::/64 dev lo
# ip -6 route list table local
[...]

Add a route on your border router to reach 2019::/64 via a real ip6 address of that machine, and bind the server to ::. This however makes the entire subnet range accessible from outside. With massbind you can be more picky on the addresses you use and dispose at runtime from within your scanning-engine or whatever use-case you have. You don't need all the configuration steps from above when using massbind.

Example

Example code is in mass.c, simply type make. It's straight forward to init and add/del the addresses at hand.

The lib will not filter special addresses. So you may get ...:ffff or similar when walking a range. You either filter these by yourself or write your code to handle errors during mb_add6() gracefully.

The lib is using the routing sockets to add/del addresses directly. You do not need to install libnl or similar. The rtnetlink API should be stable enough to work among various Linux kernel versions 3.x, 4.x and 5.x.

# ./mass add ens3 2019::1 2019::7350 64
[...]

to test adding all IPv6 addresses from range 2019::1 to 2019::7350 (inclusive) to ens3.

Efficiency

Mass adding 1000's of addresses is time consuming after a while w/o deleting unused addresses again. The Linux kernel handles addresses in double linked lists, without hash buckets:

 971 static void
 972 ipv6_link_dev_addr(struct inet6_dev *idev, struct inet6_ifaddr *ifp)
 973 {
 974         struct list_head *p;
 975         int ifp_scope = ipv6_addr_src_scope(&ifp->addr);
 976
 977         /*
 978          * Each device address list is sorted in order of scope -
 979          * global before linklocal.
 980          */
 981         list_for_each(p, &idev->addr_list) {
 982                 struct inet6_ifaddr *ifa
 983                         = list_entry(p, struct inet6_ifaddr, if_list);
 984                 if (ifp_scope >= ipv6_addr_src_scope(&ifa->addr))
 985                         break;
 986         }
 987
 988         list_add_tail_rcu(&ifp->if_list, p);
 989 }

Although the 5.x kernel has code to also maintain addresses per device within hashed lists (additional to the linked list). Walking the linked list makes the handling of addresses slow after a while. Additionally, the kernel checks flags (that we could use to speed up adding) that are impossible to set:

2953         ifp = ipv6_add_addr(idev, cfg, true, extack);
2954         if (!IS_ERR(ifp)) {
2955                 if (!(cfg->ifa_flags & IFA_F_NOPREFIXROUTE)) {
2956                         addrconf_prefix_route(&ifp->addr, ifp->prefix_len,
2957                                               ifp->rt_priority, dev, expires,
2958                                               flags, GFP_KERNEL);
2959                 }
2960

Here we would like to set IFA_F_NOPREFIXROUTE to save a call to addrconf_prefix_route() but IFA_F_NOPREFIXROUTE is defined as 0x200 while the ifa_flags can only hold 8 bits!

  8 struct ifaddrmsg {
  9         __u8            ifa_family;
 10         __u8            ifa_prefixlen;  /* The prefix length            */
 11         __u8            ifa_flags;      /* Flags                        */
 12         __u8            ifa_scope;      /* Address scope                */
 13         __u32           ifa_index;      /* Link index                   */
 14 };

So, there is no way for massbind to speed up certain things. Please outrage at your local kernel dealer and ask them to fix things. Until then, take care to also have calls to mb_del6() in your looping engine if you need >10k of disposable addresses.

References

apnic blog