Easy-SEND: A Didactic Implementation of the Secure Neighbor Discovery Protocol for IPv6

IPv6 adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as address space, built-in security, quality of service, routing and network auto-configuration. IPv6 nodes use the Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol to discover other nodes on the link, to determine their link-layer addresses, to find routers, to detect duplicate address, and to maintain reachability information about the paths to active neighbors. ND is vulnerable to various attacks when it is not secured. The original specifications of ND called for the use of IPsec as a security mechanism to protect ND messages. However, its use is impractical due to the very large number of manually configured security associations needed for protecting ND.