IPv6 News

“The countdown to the saturation of the IPv4 address supply is now down to a matter of months: and along with the vast address space of the next-generation IPv6 architecture comes more built-in network security as well as some new potential security threats. …its adoption also poses new security issues, everything from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to new vulnerabilities in IPv6 to misconfigurations that expose security holes.”

Read full story: Dark Reading

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Eric Vyncke reporting in the NetworkWorld: “IPv6 exists for more than 15 years and it is rumored to be deployed extensively in Asia and especially in Japan and China with Africa being the last continent to deploy IPv6. Another place where there should be a lot of deployments is of course in the USA with the US Government IPv6 mandates. But, when it comes to measure where web sites are actually deployed over IPv6, the rumor proves to be just a myth…”

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Verizon Business has a message to companies still reluctant to migrate their networks to IPv6: You’re better off doing it now than later. William Schmidlapp, Verizon Business’s product manager for Internet dedicated access services, says that the advent of 4G LTE and WiMAX-based devices will only increase the need to switch over to IPv6, since each of those devices will require its own IP address…

Read full story: Network World

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We are at the height of vacation season here in the Netherlands, and the RIPE NCC headquarters in Amsterdam are quieter than usual. The downtime has given me a chance to reflect on how the recent economic downturn has affected our membership growth.

The good news is that it hasn’t.

Our membership, made up of Local Internet Registries (LIRs) from our service region in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, is creeping very close to 7,000. Overall, we’ve had a stable increase in growth from 1994, when the RIPE NCC first started operations, to present day.

If we take a more detailed look at accumulative membership growth per 12-month period, you can see a definite lull in 2001-2002. This, of course, was when the dotcom bubble burst. Our membership still grew during this time, albeit at a snail’s pace.

But the recent economic downturn, even amid speculation of a double-dip recession, has not had a negative impact on our membership. One can only assume that the reason for this is that while the manufacturing and financial industries took the brunt of this economic blow, the Internet industry continues to grow at an astonishing pace.

Other factors that may impact our membership growth include IPv4 depletion, though we haven’t seen evidence of the impact of this to date.

Now back to vacation time…

Note: The RIPE NCC is an association and only its members can receive the full RIPE NCC service portfolio. Organisations become members mainly to request Internet Number Resources – IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and Autonomous System (AS) numbers.

Written by Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC

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The Internet Service Provider (ISP) community is carefully watching the impending depletion of the unassigned IPv4 address pool. Most estimates place the depletion of the central pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses by mid-2011. After that, each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) will continue to satisfy requests for additional IPv4 space for a limited time (depending on the rate of incoming requests and the amount of address space on hand in the RIR at the time of central pool depletion).

To continue growing, ISPs require access to a steady stream of IP addresses to connect new customers. In ARIN’s service region (Canada, the United States, and parts of the Caribbean), allocation policies have resulted in growing ISPs requesting additional IP addresses every 6 to 12 months. These policies emphasize that addresses are available based on documented need per community-developed criteria; similar policies exist in the four RIRs serving the other regions of the globe.

As the available supply of IPv4 address space dwindles, ISPs are encouraged to deploy IP version 6 (IPv6), which is the successor protocol to IPv4 developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). All of the application protocols that make the Internet a great success (e.g. HTTP for the world wide web, SMTP for email, etc.) work over IPv6, so it is predominantly a network change resulting in a new Internet that still looks to the end-user just like the IPv4 Internet today.

However, organizations looking to deploy IPv6 may be undertaking their most significant network change to date. While IPv6 has similar routing and performance properties when it comes to connecting new customers, the need to interoperate with the existing IPv4 Internet requires that ISPs must also provide IPv6/IPv4 address translation of customers’ traffic. This interoperability requirement creates a number of engineering and capital challenges that are of great concern to ISPs across the globe.

Because of these challenges, ISPs are also interested in alternatives to deploying IPv6, or ways to defer their IPv6 initiatives until a time they deem most appropriate. This is reasonable, as ISPs are businesses that must manage their resources as efficiently as possible to stay competitive, and each faces unique issues regarding the optimal time for additional infrastructure investment and deployment.

ISPs wishing to use IPv4 to continue connecting new customers for a short time post-depletion do have an option: to get usable IPv4 address space via a third-party. This approach may temporarily allow deferring the technical and capital challenges associated with introducing IPv6 infrastructure, but substitutes other potential costs and risks that may be manageable from the ISP’s perspective.

In the ARIN region, a transfer of IPv4 address space to a specified recipient is possible due to a relatively new policy that was formulated and endorsed by the community. The “Transfers to Specified Recipients” policy (contained in section 8.3 of the ARIN Number Resource Policy Manual – NRPM) recognizes that some organizations may wish to release IPv4 address space to ARIN for reassignment to a specified party that has documented need.

Since Internet number resource assignments ‘are valid as long as the criteria continues to be met’ (per IETF RFC 2050), address holders who no longer need their IPv4 addresses have always been encouraged to return them to the RIR system so that they can be assigned to those with need. In fact, many organizations (including the US Dept of Defense, BBN, and Stanford University) have returned significant amounts of IPv4 address space for the benefit of the Internet community.

It is relatively straightforward for organizations to return entire address blocks, but years of mergers, reorganizations, and equipment upgrades often result in organizations using addresses that are sparsely allocated out of many address blocks. Those that want to do the right thing and renumber to free up address space for return may face a formidable task, depending on the complexity and scale of their operation. One of the most significant benefits of the transfer policy is that it provides an incentive for the return of address space which otherwise would remain underutilized.

There are several things for organizations to consider before using this policy. First, the Specified Transfer policy provides a way of getting IPv4 address space once your need has been documented and approved by ARIN, per the normal IPv4 address space request process. (From a practical perspective, there’s very little reason for ISPs to use the Specified Transfer policy as long as ARIN has available resources for approved IPv4 requests). Second, any address space to be transferred must be under a registration services agreement with ARIN, as the process of bringing it under agreement allows for address holder verification. Later this year, ARIN will provide a listing service for organizations that have approved requests for address space and for those that may be able to make resources available for transfer.

ISPs considering extending their existing model with this approach have one additional item to consider: while continuing to use IPv4 for customer connections may be expedient in the immediate future, the cost-effectiveness of this approach will quickly diminish with the growth of IPv6-based Internet capabilities. ISPs deferring their transition to IPv6-based services will eventually have to compete with those who faced the challenge and built their IPv6 capabilities from the beginning.

Written by John Curran, President and CEO at American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

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War, famine, pestilence and death.

They fought for the last IPv4 addresses, hoarded and sold them at outrageous prices, traffic and commerce came slowly to a halt… Pestilence invaded the internet…

Bandits roam the lands. A retired general told recently that the internet looks like the North German plains, easy to invade. Cyberwar and Cybersecurity are becoming mainstream subjects and have increasing Government attention.

In France an ultra secure lab was set up in Nancy to handle and find antidotes for the most dangerous of these viruses to avoid a E-bola type pandemic. They manipulate these viruses in a network completely isolated from the rest of the internet. As isolated and sterile as a P4 lab for infectious diseases.

Nasty IPv6 strains? Masquerading as some-one else was supposed to be more difficult with IPv6 as address abundance would result in much less Network Address Manipulation. But the NAT remains a source of possible pestilence. And will privacy options in IPv6 making it easier still for bad guys to hide?

In the meantime the reality of the paucity of IPv4 addresses sinks in. Five percent of the space left and the IANA granaries will be empty in 300 days or so.

The world notices. The Renesys reports which provide the pulse of the internet to all its serious practitioners noted that over the late July 10 day period, 440 new IPv6 prefixes were registered compared to 1449 IPv4 prefixes. 23% of all registrations are now IPv6. This proportion will certainly continue to rise quite rapidly.

The white, red, black and pale stallions will remain in their stables.

Written by Yves Poppe, Director, Business Development IP Strategy

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IP, the Internet Protocol, is one of the pillars which support the Internet. Almost 20 years old, first specified in a remarkably concise 45 pages in RFC 791, IP is the network-layer protocol for the Internet.
In 1991, the IETF decided that the current version of IP, called IPv4, had outlived its design. The new version [...]

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As Internet uses, we are accustomed to navigating between websites using their unique address names, known as domain names or URLs (although technically URL actually refers to what follows after the domain name). In fact, however, computers communicate with one another exclusively through another unique address system, a series of numbers called an Internet Protocol [...]

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This graph illustrates the three phases that have defined the RIPE community’s journey to IPv6 deployment since 1999. (Click to Enlarge)In the previous graph and article published here two weeks ago, we showed that many ISPs in the RIPE NCC service region (Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia) have not yet obtained IPv6 addresses from the RIPE NCC. Our latest graph demonstrates just how quickly this is changing.

In this graph you can see the number of IPv6 allocations made by the RIPE NCC to its members since 1999. Three phases are clearly visible:

Experimental Phase (1999 – 2002)

During the experimental phase allocations were made sporadically.

Early Adopters (2002 – 2007)

During this phase there was a steady flow of requests from early adopters.

Deployment (2007 – Now)

Since 2007 we have witnessed a growing number of IPv6 allocation requests.

More and more ISPs are obtaining IPv6 addresses at present, which is very encouraging. It is essential that all organisations worldwide will deploy IPv6 quickly enough to ensure the sustainable growth of the Internet.

Read more about this graph on the RIPE Labs site.

Written by Daniel Karrenberg, Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC

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John Ribeiro from IDG News reports: “India will start using IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) from March 2012, according to a new roadmap released by the Indian government. All telecom and ISPs will have to be IPv6-compliant by the end of next year and offer IPv6 services thereafter, the government said in a statement issued on Wednesday by the country’s Press Information Bureau.”

Read full story: PC World

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