Tag Archives: IPv6

Major IPv6 Cisco Upgrade (IOS)

June 4, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

“Our biggest goal in IOS now is to have parity between IPv4 and IPv6,” Faraz Aladin, Director, Marketing Cloud Switching and Services at Cisco told InternetNews.com. “Whatever you can do in IPv4, you should be able to do with IPv6.”

From an article at: Cisco Upgrades IOS for IPv6 – www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com

While Cisco has been providing support for IPv6 for nearly 12 years on its network equipment, IPv6 isn’t just about basic packet forwarding. Joel Conover, Director Marketing, Borderless Networks at Cisco toldInternetNews.com that getting IOS ready for IPv6 is a big job that includes a lot of incremental bits.

“When you look at the massive size of IOS, with over 2,500 features, if every single one needs to be re-written to support IPv6, that takes time,” Conover said.

One feature that has taken time to land in IOS involves time itself. The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is now available in IPv6. Conover noted that it was previously not supported by IPv6 and needed to be re-written.

Security is also now being improved in Cisco IOS for IPv6 with a technology called first hop security. Aladin explained that a possible risk that had existed with IPv6 before was that another device could have been sitting on a network, spoofing a user’s address. First hop security provides a degree of authentication, to ensure that the address server is authentic and the user can trust the IPv6 address information.

Cisco is now also leveraging the Location/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) to help network administrators deploy IPv6 with IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels. LISP is an emerging standard for routing Internet traffic.

Who Wants IPv6?

With the exhaustion of the free pool of IPv4 address space, the need for IPv6 is now well understood. According to a Cisco survey of 101 U.S IT leaders, 78 percent are currently planning for an IPv6 transition.

Security is the top concern in IPv6 transition efforts with 92 percent of survey respondents noting that their IT organization’s security department is part of the IPv6 migration.

As organizations move to IPv6 though, they still expect certain things to work that did in the IPv4 world.

“When we talk to customers — they tell us they want to implement IPv6, but here is a list of things that I can do with IPv4, and unless I can do them in IPv6 I can’t make the transition,” Aladin said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

Basic Lessons

[Update] IPv6, Security, Future Near

May 31, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

The 27th Chaos Communication Congress – subtitled We Come In Peace had an excellent presentation on IPv6 by Marc Heuse, an expert in the field and creator of several tools to test IPv6 security.

IPv6 is the coming standard for intranets, the internet and most IT/IP interconnect equipment. It is quite different from the IPv4, which is currently in place in all of our network systems. The IPv4 protocols use the typical 4 octet system, e.g. 192.168.1.1 (taking 32 bits), while IPv6 uses 128 bit address of numbers and letters. The comparison is 232 v 3.4 x 1038 – the number is 340 undecillion unique addresses.

Other advantages include autoconfiguration of IP addresses and networking, a hierarchical address structure which reduces operational cost and several Integrated security features.

As Mr. Heuse points out, all major operating systems and most modern routers already support IPv6, but it is turned off. For most intranet installations, IPv4 will probably continue to be sufficient and won’t need to be replaced by IPv6. But as with all new protocols, there are some advantages that might move manufacturers to use the system to uniquely identify equipment for communication security, or other features that are not available with IPv4. Therefore we need to stay abreast of its advantages and potential pitfalls. Especially when one of the current problems being worked out is security weaknesses in tunneling, when using IPv4 and IPv6 together (like that will ever happen!). And though it handles multicasting more securely than with IPv4, that area is also one that has some issues.

The issues with security come from the standard’s original outline being laid out 15 years ago. It dealt with the security problems of the time. Recommended practices have been developed to upgrade the protocol’s implementaion, but there are many, and they aren’t always dealt with the same way by all manufacturers.

Notwithstanding this, IPv6 is being tested this month in a ‘live on the internet’ plug fest fashion. It will be rolled out in the coming months. The Youtube video that follows isn’t for everyone, but it should be for everyone who claims to be a professional in the entertainment technology field of digital cinema, as cinema is by its nature ‘unique addresses’, on the internet and very concerned with security.

This link points to a page that has several slide presentations on the subject:
27C3: Recent advances in IPv6 insecurities
Don’t miss this slide presentation: Recent Advances In IPv6 Insecurities

Side note before the 53 minute video, if you run across any interesting information in this field, or recommendations or comments by the technologists in the d-cinema field about IPv6, please forward it to the editor.

Other articles:
Last of the IPv4 Addresses Allocated
Understand IPv6 Addresses

YouTube – [27C3] (en) Recent advances in IPv6 insecurities

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Tangential Art and Science

Last of the IPv4 Addresses Allocated

February 2, 2011 Like Tangents In The Rain Leave a comment

Early this morning, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) announced that it had been allocated two /8 address blocks from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA ). Those two blocks, 39/8 and 106/8, were the last unallocated blocks in the IANA free pool of IPv4 address available to Regional Internet Registries (RIR). With the allocation, the final days of IPv4 have moved closer as the number of available addresses that can be allocated will dwindle.

“Please be aware, this will be the final allocation made by IANA under the current framework and will trigger the final distribution of five /8 blocks, one to each RIR under the agreed global policy for the allocation of the remaining IPv4 address space,” APNIC wrote on its website.

From the Enterprising Networking Planet article:
Last of the IPv4 Addresses Allocated
By Sean Michael Kerner February 1, 2011

IANA has scheduled a press conference for Thursday morning to discuss the final allocation of the last five blocks of IPv4 space. The policy of distributing the final five equally among the RIRs is a long standing policy designed for the endgame of IPv4.

While the IANA free pool is now gone, that doesn’t mean that IPv4 address space itself has been exhausted. The RIRs make requests from IANA for free, …

APNIC expects to continue to make normal allocations of IPv4 address space to its constituents for the next three to six months. After that,….

In the U.S., the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is the RIR responsible for address allocation. John Curran, CEO of ARIN, …

“We have no official forecast, and any estimate would change rapidly depending on requests received,” …

More impetus for the IPv6 migration

With freely available, unallocated IPv4 addresses almost gone, the move to the next generation IPv6 addressing system which provides significantly more address space than IPv4 must begin in earnest….

To date, IPv6 adoption has been slow, though the RIRs have been advocating for its adoption.

“The RIRs have been working with network operators at the local, regional, and global level for more than a decade …

Pawlik added that the transition to IPv6 from IPv4 represents an opportunity for even more innovative applications …

Though IPv4 is now nearly exhausted, the move to IPv4 will take time. The Internet Society has scheduled World IPv6 day for June ….

“Internet users need to realize that the Internet will be in transition over several years, with both IPv4 and IPv6 running in parallel,…