Real World Applications of IPv6 from NTT Communications

IPv6 Perfect Storm

IPv6 Forum Fellow, North American IPv6 Task Force Technology Director, and HP Distinguished Technologist and Strategist, Yanick Pouffary, wonders: Over the past decade there have been many papers and news articles written about IPv6. So why write yet another article on IPv6 today? What has changed? The news is that IPv6 is already present on many networks and is being deployed, often accidentally, without planning, and most importantly without the necessary IT policies and procedures in place to ensure continued safe operation of mission critical infrastructure. The reality is that the available IPv4 address space(i) is continuing to shrink with about ten percent of IPv4 unassigned addresses remaining. The available address space will be consumed within two years.

At the same time, the Internet and communications industries continue to deploy increasingly complex and unsustainable technologies to mitigate the immediate impact of this shortage, rather than investing in the future and facilitating or enabling new usage models. These shortsighted efforts constitute poor investments and will not forestall the transition.

Within this context two threads of activity are creating a “perfect storm.”

1. IPv6 is arriving on a network close to you. Major operating systems and equipment vendors are already shipping IPv6(ii) as part of their product. IPv6 is often enabled by default. As a result, IPv6 is already running on most networks although this is often a rogue or unwitting deployment running “under IT’s radar.”(iii) Add to this that the level of “completeness” of IPv6 implementations varies wildly, and most network managers lack the tools to manage, monitor or even detect IPv6 usage in their networks.

2. We are at the dawn of a second revolution in network usage, comparable to the Internet itself. Businesses assume the Internet already provides pervasive connectivity and business plans are made on that assumption. Eighty percent of the world’s population is not yet connected, yet this population represents a target for much of the new business now being developed.

What will happen when the rate of consumption of Internet addresses changes because of a new convergence model or new government stimuli? What will happen when our home, cars, offices, as well as the products we buy, the packaging for our food and medicine and perhaps even humans themselves are IP addressable? Put simply, the current IPv4-based infrastructure just cannot sustain the growth of attached Internet-based “things” IPv6 can. The convergence to “everything over IP” is the real driving force.

IPv6 support will soon be a business continuity issue and companies need to make sure that everything they deliver can operate correctly over any network regardless of the IP version.

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i) Industry IPv4 exhaustion counter http://inetcore.com/project/ipv4ec/index_en.html
ii) IPv6 Forum IPv6 Ready Logo Program http://www.ipv6ready.org/. By June 30, 2009, 393 products had acquired IPv6 Ready Phase-1 Logo and 261 products had acquired the IPv6 Ready Phase-2 Logo.
iii) See ZDnet Asia article published on August 18, 2009 - “IPv6: Oops, it’s on by default” http://www.zdnetasia.com/techguide/security/0,39044901,62056959,00.htm
See Wired article published on July 28, 2009 - “Future of Cyber Security: Hackers have grown up” http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/07/dp_security_wired0728
See Network World article published on July 2009 - “Invisible IPv6 traffic poses serious network threat” http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/071309-rogue-ipv6.html
See the list of IPv6 Hacking tools at http://www.thc.org/thc-ipv6