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QuercusMaxyesterday at 4:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

Here's an example of a potential security hole caused by lack of ipv6 knowledge:

I've been setting up Snapcast (open-source multi-room audio), and needed to move the server to a different machine. While I was setting up the new system, I told it to only bind to localhost. Somehow this only affects the ipv4 networking stack, as some of my clients started automatically connecting to the new server even before I had finished all my testing.

Turns out that it was advertising some kind of ipv6 link-local address that showed up in autodiscovery. In my case there wasn't any harm, but this type of thing could very easily result in a major security vulnerability.


Replies

jeroenhdyesterday at 7:15 PM

Localhost doesn't appear on autodiscovery. Whatever you ran into had nothing to do with IPv6, but rather with your application not binding to the address you were telling it to bind to. On IPv6, localhost binds to ::1, not anything reachable by any other address. Furthermore, whatever you set up automatically seems to have added itself to your server's firewall, which is equally troubling.

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jcglyesterday at 4:50 PM

I don't see how this generalizes into a security hole caused be lack of IPv6 knowledge. It just sounds like a random bug in Snapcast (great program!). If a user configures a program to only bind to loopback, but the program binds to other interfaces as well, that's a bug in the program.

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