What About IPv6?
By Ray Bernard and Rodney Thayer
A short note about IPv6 relating to the upcoming series of IPv6 articles for Security Technology Executive magazine. • June 2011
On June 8, 2011 the Internet Society conducted the World IPv6 Day event. Thus it seems that it's really time to start paying attention to IPv6.
Did you know that outside the U.S. there are a considerable number of major network IPv6 deployments? The U.S. has just over 41% of the issued IP addresses issued in the world, with the next closest countries coming in at 8.95% (China) and 5.45% (Japan). See the map below, courtesy of the BGP Expert website. Thus interest in IPv6 has been much higher outside of the U.S., since many countries have already been experiencing Internet IP address shortages.
Global IPv6 Deployments
There are entire deployed networks in Asia that are built on IPv6. This is far cry from having a few trade show booths with IPv6 set up to assert that the vendors are forward-thinking. See the sidebar titled, “Global IPv6 Deployment.”
To get a peek at what's going on with global IPv6 deployments, see these websites:
Global IP Network IPv6 Service
http://tinyurl.com/global-ip-network-ipv6-service
Global IPv6 Summit 2011
http://www.conference.cn/ipv6/2011/en/
The Bigger IPv6 Picture
For an introduction to the need for moving to IPv6, and some of the benefits of it—not just for the Internet but for private networks as well—watch the video below, courtesy of explania.com.
In the late 1990's there was much activity in the Internet standards community. The .com boom was rolling, use of the Internet was expanding, and commerce-based cryptography and security standards were just being developed. Many network protocols were devised, refined, and/or standardized during this time. Among these was IPv6.
IPv6 was the solution to IPv4 address limitation as well as a logical evolution of the Internet for many reasons. But IPv6 wasn't alone. It was a member of an entire array of next-generation Internet protocol and standard development efforts.
So the theory was that by IPv4 Address Exhaustion Day, we would have our technology acts together about all the other elements of networking.
But we’re not there yet. That’s one reason why the World IPv6 Day tests were organized by the Internet Society and held on June 8, 2011.
Nearly 400 participating organizations enabled IPv6 on their main services for 24 hours on June 8th. As the Internet Society stated in their monthly newsletter that followed, “With IPv4 addresses running out this year, the industry must act quickly to accelerate full IPv6 adoption or risk increased costs and limited functionality online for Internet users everywhere. World IPv6 Day participants came together to help motivate organizations across the industry–Internet service providers, hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors and other web companies–to prepare their services for the transition.”
However, the Internet level IPv6 addressing tested on World IPv6 day is literally just the tip of the iceberg as far as the full IPv6 networking vision is concerned. The upcoming IPv6 articles Security Technology Executive magazine will take a close look at the full IPv6 vision, especially at those elements that are important for physical security system end users and their IT departments, as well as security system designers, convergence engineers, manufacturers and systems integrators.
Security Systems Impact
IPv4 has 4.3 billion IP addresses, while IPv6 has 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses. IPv6 fits the vision of an Internet where “any device could connect directly to any other device in the world.”
For security practitioners, devices on your security network will have to have that direct device-to-device, system-to-system, and system-to-device level of capability and interoperability. You will need it if you want to engage in the level of real-time risk analysis and real-time communications and notification responses (via the corporate network and the Internet) that will be called for over the next decade. It is a given that your current security systems technology is almost completely unready for that near-term future.
Look at the impact that cell phone video and text messaging have on policing, and on capturing safety and security incidents that appear on the Internet and TV. Consider the role that text messaging, mobile email and cell phone communications play in day-to-day security operations. For many universities, a fair portion of the student population is likely to know about a campus violence situation before Security can get its wits wrapped around it, thanks to text messaging, Twitter, and so on.
This was not the case eight years ago.
Now realize that the rate of technological change and related social change is continually accelerating, meaning that the differences in communications technologies, and in security response, will be that different again but in only four years.
This is why the success of World IPv6 Day is not necessarily good news for security practitioners, whose systems capabilities are largely dependent upon what the security industry has to offer. The security industry has a history of not fully understanding and not keeping up with changes in computer and networking technology. For corporate security practitioners, this also means that many of your future security systems capabilities will be provided not by security industry vendors, but by your IT department.