[LINK] Fwd: Expert Panel: The Seven Stages of IPv6 Adoption

[Karl Auer]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 09:57 +0100, Kim Holburn wrote:
> > If Microsoft adopted IPv6 as an experiment

done

> , then a beta,

done

>  then a duplicate service alongside IPv4

done

>  and finally as solely IPv6

not practical, not even for Microsoft. Dual stack will be around for a
while yet.

> My understanding is that the three main end device OS's: Windows,  
> MacOS and Linux all do IPv6 and have done for a while.

Even more importantly, so does the main carrier equipment, Cisco et al.

>   It's the  
> consumer edge devices and the ISPs that are the main issues.  I could  
> be completely wrong about that.

That's pretty much right, at least in the low-end home/soho/consumer
world. Not the same drivers for the corporate and government users
though.

However, consumer and SOHO can have IPv6 right now via at least four
different forms of tunnelling - static, 6to4, Teredo and TSP. The first
is very difficult for the average non-tech to set up and generally
require static IP addresses, the second and third are mostly automatic
but have poor performance (usually - depends where the "local" server
is), TSP is the most powerful and is relatively easy to set up,
especially for Windows.

> If for instance you discover the IPv6 address of the PM or the POTUS  
> then anyone in the world might get to know that.  It's a privacy worry.

It's a bit of a fallacy that our current IPv4 addresses are somehow
private. It's a very fair bet that any home user's address is in one of
a few common RFC1918 ranges like 192.168.1.0/24. Locating the public
address fronting a home/SOHO NAT box is pretty easy. Any connection any
iside machine makes to the outside world gives it away. Receive an email
from someone and the chances are good that you'll see their IP address
in the Received: headers. This is the relevant header from your email,
for example:

Received: from [192.168.2.3] (84.220.248.163) by jack.mail.tiscali.it
(8.0.022) id 499F036C013DACB5 for link at anu.edu.au; Thu, 26 Mar 2009
09:57:33 +0100

Mail servers can rewrite stuff, but there's a pretty good chance that
your PC still has the address 192.168.2.3, and that the outside address
on your ADSL or cable router is still 84.220.248.163. Certainly it
reverse resolves to what looks a lot like the name of a dynamically
allocated address:

   host-84-220-248-163.cust-adsl.tiscali.it.

Both those addresses are likely to be relatively long-lived - certainly
many minutes, and in most cases hours or even days. Plenty of time to
investigate them thoroughly. Corporate and government networks are
generally much more stable than that.

You can be more private in a public IPv6 subnet (if you really want to
be) than is possible in IPv4 at all. Take a new address every second,
it'll be 500 billion years before you ever need to reuse an address. And
good luck trying to scan for them!

So no, not a privacy issue. Or at least no more than with IPv4, and
probably a great deal less.

Regards, K.

Disclaimer: http://www.ipv6now.com.au/about.php

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)

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