Today, the Internet is a digital communication world made up of massive flows of information, social networks, news, blogs, email, instant messaging, etc. The Internet has more than 35 years of life, which in Information Technology is a long time, and is already an essential part of our daily activities. This is the approximate time that the base Internet protocol must have been defined: IP, or correctly, IPv4.
During the conception of IPv4, the limited number of devices to connect (around 4 billion addresses) was known, but the boom we would see was unknown, particularly in the last 10 years. This has meant that the number of available addresses is running out, and the trend indicates that they will soon be completely sold out.
As of July 1, 2009, an additional 1000 days was considered to assign IPv4 addresses. After this, what’s next? Future plans include connecting practically any electronic device, mobile phones, and even household appliances to the network, thus allowing additional services to be obtained, such as remote support, equipment capable of reporting lack of inventory, automatic failure reports, GPS, among others.
To solve the problem of the limited number of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 was born as a protocol under RFC 2460 of the IETF in 1996, allowing to have approximately 85% of 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses assignable (3.4 x 1038) of IPv6 addresses. At 13 years of its inception, few organizations have migrated to IPv6. Many of them have been federal agencies of the United States to comply with an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guideline to have connectivity with IPv6 no later than June 2008. The obligatory question is: Why, if we know that IPv4 addresses will end, the IPv6 protocol has not been adopted, and it has not been given the importance it has?
Basic changes in IPv6
Before answering the question, it is necessary to indicate the most important changes in IPv6 to understand how it varies from IPv4. The most significant changes are:
– Network autoconfiguration: Hosts will use the MAC address to obtain a valid local network address and get connectivity (they will not be routable on the Internet).
– IPSec: IPSec (protocol oriented to provide authentication and encryption) was made for IPv6, allowing secure communication between 2 entities.
– Elimination of Broadcast: Due to many IPv6 addresses, the Broadcast was eliminated, and only multicast addresses are left for mass communication.
– Fragmentation: In IPv4, large packet fragmentation is done on routers. In IPv6, this fragmentation will be done on the transmitting equipment.
– Fixed header size: In IPv4, there was a variable option segment. In IPv6, the size is fixed at 40 bytes with well-defined fields to process a packet.
– Routing: The routing tables will be huge, but packet handling will be more efficient given the elimination of fragmentation in routers and Checksum in IPv6.
Possibility of having multiple IP addresses on a single computer.
Why hasn’t IPv6 been given importance?
An economic factor dictates the first answer: It represents a significant expense for companies, from which a return on investment would not necessarily be seen since practically nobody uses IPv6. Furthermore, it does not provide a significant advantage in terms of business strategies (unless the business is the continuous publication of services on the Internet). As if that were not enough, the cost of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 implies training, new equipment with greater hardware capabilities, investment in software adjustments, to name a few. Finally, all large corporations already have IPv4 addresses assigned, and there is no reason to migrate to IPv6.
The previous paragraph shows that financially there are no reasons to migrate to IPv6, taking into account only the current context and not considering an intermediate future.
From a technical point of view, migration involves considerations such as:
– Technological paradigm shift (different coding, different configuration, different notation).
– Change of technologies to those that support IPv6.
– Changes in routing schemes.
– Huge tables in routing schemes.
– Interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6 (which is defined in the protocol).
– Changes in applications.
– Changes in the base protocols (ARP, ICMP, IGMP).
– Increased amount of bandwidth (IPv6 header is almost twice as large as IPv4).
In addition to this, a type of patch commonly called NAT was implemented, which allows one or more IPv4 addresses that are not routable on the Internet to go out with a single address translated to the world. This put off the idea of needing more IP addresses for a while.
Future of IPv6
IPv6 has only been delayed because there is no current need, which does not allow for an economic justification. However, the need will be there soon, and it is becoming increasingly apparent. IPv6 is ready to use; Those of us who are not prepared are the ones who will use this new protocol.
I make a kind invitation to the reader to review your operating system. Linux supports it since 1996 (with the appropriate Kernel), Windows Vista has it enabled by default, as does MAC OS X.
Independent and educational groups in the United States have researched the actual use of IPv4. Studies have shown that up to 40% of the space available on the Internet is unused. However, many of these studies are based on the idea of a host’s response to a request for a service. A Firewall could not be allowing such a response, giving a significant and not measurable margin of error. What is a fact is that there is a lot of wasted IPv4, and there may be some leeway as long as deprecated IPv4 can be recovered. However, wasted IPv4 can be monetized. It can be used to earn money. Sites like IPXO can help the owners monetize IPv4.
As end consumers, especially ISPs, have not pushed the implementation of IPv6, security products would not be IPv6 ready either. This would pose a much greater problem since information and communications would be vulnerable. The only thing missing is the paradigm shift in 2011 or 2012: when the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) announces that globally routable IPv4 addresses have been exhausted. This is real.
IPv6 security
IPv6 was defined in a period where there were already various network attacks, beyond a virus that was transmitted through a floppy, such as theft of sessions, packets hidden in other packets, spying listening to a conversation in clear text, etc. IPv6 was designed to eradicate useless aspects of IPv4 and strengthen the confidential aspect by integrating IPSec into the protocol.
Incorporating IPSec into IPv6 does not eliminate the need to segment networks and place intrusion detectors, eliminating the danger of session theft, denial of services, etc. Simply the protocol will allow a greater number of connected devices.
