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Windows Defender Firewall Inbound Rule for ICMPv6

Hi!

I'm getting more into IPv6 these days and found that ICMP is very important for IPv6 connectivity.

Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security (on Windows 10 at least) comes with some inbound ICMPv6 allow rules, but unfortunately they don't allow for quite enough.

I went ahead to create a rule by hand, but found out that you cannot set a group for the rule through the GUI, so instead I opted for creating a little PowerShell command.

You have to run it from a UAC-elevated PowerShell instance.

This rule is based on the existing default ICMPv6 rules.

Create the rule:

New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Core Networking - CUSTOM - Allow Incoming ICMPv6" -Group "Core Networking" -Direction Inbound -Action Allow -Protocol ICMPv6 -Program System

Remove the rule again:

Remove-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Core Networking - CUSTOM - Allow Incoming ICMPv6"

Some people may want to exclude echo request for privacy or "security (through obscurity)" reasons, but I don't think it's that big of a deal.

Of course feel free to customize the command in general. The official documentation page (docs.microsoft.com) is very informative.

If you have any other firewalls between you and the sender, you may have to check their rules as well.

I tested the rules with a website like ipv6-test.com.

Thanks for reading!