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Mapping the Spectral Landscape of IPv6 Networks (duo.com)
Trailrunner7 writes: Like real estate, we're not making any more IPv4 addresses. But instead of trying to colonize Mars or build cities under the sea, the Internet's architects developed a separate address scheme with an unfathomably large pool of addresses. IPv6 has an address space of 2^128, compared to IPv4's 2^32, and as the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space began to approach, registries started allocating IPv6 addresses and there now are billions of those addresses active at any given time. But no one really knows how many or where they are or what's behind them or how they're organized.
A pair of researchers decided to tackle the problem and developed a suite of tools that can find active IPv6 addresses both in the global address space and in smaller, targeted networks. Known as ipv666, the open source tool set can scan for live IPv6 hosts using a statistical model that the researchers built. The researchers, Chris Grayson and Marc Newlin, faced a number of challenges as they went about developing the ipv666 tools, including getting a large IPv6 address list, which they accumulated from several publicly available data sets. They then began the painful process of building the statistical model to predict other IPv6 addresses based on their existing list.
That may seem weird, but IPv6 addresses are nothing at all like their older cousins and come in a bizarre format that doesn't lend itself to simple analysis or prediction. Grayson and Newlin wanted to find as many live addresses as possible and ultimately try to figure out what the security differences are between devices on IPv4 and those on IPv6.
A pair of researchers decided to tackle the problem and developed a suite of tools that can find active IPv6 addresses both in the global address space and in smaller, targeted networks. Known as ipv666, the open source tool set can scan for live IPv6 hosts using a statistical model that the researchers built. The researchers, Chris Grayson and Marc Newlin, faced a number of challenges as they went about developing the ipv666 tools, including getting a large IPv6 address list, which they accumulated from several publicly available data sets. They then began the painful process of building the statistical model to predict other IPv6 addresses based on their existing list.
That may seem weird, but IPv6 addresses are nothing at all like their older cousins and come in a bizarre format that doesn't lend itself to simple analysis or prediction. Grayson and Newlin wanted to find as many live addresses as possible and ultimately try to figure out what the security differences are between devices on IPv4 and those on IPv6.
Maybe it's not bizarre for someone with years of background, but to regular users, the address format is the biggest hurdle to adoption. I am able to explain an IPv4 address to a nine year old. However I don't understand Ipv6 addressing fully myself as it's just too damn complicated and cryptic with all colons and hex. Whoever designed that should be put against the wall retroactively. ::::ff::00 -- say what? My gateway address is ::::323::f0::c7, so my local address is ::::00::e1::27??
My IP is
I still don't understand what would be hard in adding two octals to the current IPv4 scheme. 10.1.192.168.1.7 would be a valid, understandable address. The IPv6 scheme is crap and will NEVER be embraced by users.
Reality - we're not giving away FREE ipv4 addresses any more.
AWS just got 3.0.0.0/8 - I thought we'd run out? Oh wait, lots of big allocations still sitting basically unused all over the place.
Charge even $1/year and watch how much ipv4 address space frees up.
>> but to regular users, the address format is the biggest hurdle to adoption.
That's OK.
Regular users don't need to do anything with an IP address.
aaaaaaa