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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.
Remember when /. used to be a tech site that knew "large, but finite" wasn't the same as "infinite"?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Natalie Portman would be ashamed of being referenced by a site like this!
I've been seeing some golang spider probing my websites in an odd way, so now it is blocked.
The Post author is completely wrong when he says that IPv6 is in some bizarre format. IPv6 is exactly the same as IPv4, it's block of numbers. The primary difference is that IPv4 was arranged in a set of 4 blocks of 255 bit numbers. This was workable with a 32 bit address. Ipv6 on the other hand has 128 bits.
To handle a 128 bit address with the same 255 block format of ipv4 you'd need 16 blocks rather than 4. To make this easier and narrow it down to just 8 blocks of 4 digits they decided using HEX would be easier. The addressing scheme was also designed to solve many of the problems Ipv4 had, including automatic creation of a private locally addressable-only address space (the link local).
They also added an address assignment scheme that didn't required DHCP to find an assign an IPv6 address. This is called SLACC and in theory makes it trivial to setup an IPv6 network of devices without needing to build a huge DHCP server (for example in a factory where machinery needs IP addresses but have very primitive computing resources). They also designed the network so that it wouldn't be fragmented requiring huge BGP tables. Every Ipv6 network address is supposed to come with 64 bits of addresses for the user (providing the ISP complies with the RFC and provides each user a /64 as the RFC requires. What this means is that with every public IPv6 address you have 2 IPv4 networks worth of addresses to use on your own network.
There was a lot of though that went into IPv6 into solving a lot of the problems of IPv4. It does take a little getting used to because the numbers are so much bigger and it uses HEX by default to narrow down the number of digits. But other than the spin up of learning about all the new features of IPv6 and getting used to using HEX addressing it's quite a bit nicer to use IMO.
Like real estate, we're not making any more IPv4 addresses.
New IP addresses are made every time an organization rolls out a VLAN in the 10/8 range.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
Just wait until IPv8 comes out.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Everything is just a number. A Matroska movie is just a big number. But parts of the IPv6 address have meanings, some of them complex, albiet not really "inscrutable". :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Uh, no it wasn't. Indeed, IPv6 was intended to prevent any monitoring at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think the author of the article is having trouble with the concept of "sparsely populated" and therefore calling it "bizarre".
With IPv4, someone can easily scan all 2^32 possible addresses in a reasonable amount of time (actually fewer than 2^32 given the various "non routable" reserved addresses. But for IPv6, they really can't perform an exhaustive scan of all possible 2^128 possible addresses. In fact, to do a reasonable scan, they have to determine all the ISPs out there which are given /29 through /32 addresses ranges to manage. And then the ISPs with their own addresses ranges then have free reign as to how they then manage the remaining 96 to 99 bits of addressing.
So yes, doing an exhaustive scan of world wide allocated IPv6 addresses is definitely not a trivial problem.
It's old, antiquated technology the libertarians and conservatives killed in the 90s.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
OMFG man! What a nonsense conspiracy theory!
* feeding the trolls since *put a very early internet year here*
Haven't we heard about the "impending" exhaustion of IP addresses now for what, at least a decade?
-Styopa
There are bound to be some people to find a way to implement a NAT, for whatever reason.
One thing I am curious about is how mobile hotspots will work? From what I understand you phone is creating a NATed subnet, using the single IP address assigned to you, but how will that work in the IPv6 world without NAT?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
While IPv6 is a technological failure -- came way too early, full of design problems, partially already obsolete before good and well deployed -- the IPv4 address space exhaustion is real. You don't hear that much about it yet since the anglophone space still has lots of grandfathered unused space that can be squeezed a bit in a pinch. But CGNAT is the scaled-up version of the idiot and fairly desperate NAT thing, and it shows up in ever more places. Again, often in places that don't necessarily speak English so you don't hear about it that often. But it's happening.
IPv6 was implemented because we were running out of IPv4.
That's conservation, not conservatism.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
we already have "build cities under the sea" using NAT!
I'm seeing more and more help requests from gamers who aren't able to play a networked game because they sit behind a NATed IPv4 firewall they don't control, which blocks the ports their game needs and doesn't have UPnP enabled (for automatic port forwarding). Usually they're apartment dwellers, but a small number of them are people whose ISPs are putting them behind a NAT (i.e. the ISP has more customers than IPv4 addresses).
Turns out there is this for mobile hotspots: https://lkhill.com/ipv6-based-...
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Of course, IPv4 is slicker'n deer guts on a doorknob in this respect.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I see that /. revised the headline: when I posted that comment, the headline was "Mapping the Infinitely Large Address Space of IPv6 Networks". Now it's been revised to remove the "infinitely large" phrase: "Mapping the Spectral Landscape of IPv6 Networks."
So, if it seems like the comment doesn't make sense-- that's why.
It's why the original specification mandated encryption. Not at endpoints, but at tunnels. So neither your MAC address nor your data was ever visible.
Since you could set your MAC address, it wouldn't have mattered much anyway. You didn't own an IP address, you owned access to a router, or as many routers as you liked. Your IP was generated from the path and what you advertised.
Total anonymity and total privacy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The only history that matters is IPng and IPv6 draft, prior to RFC status and then when IPSec is ratified.
But, then, you don't want history. You much prefer your pram.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Isp controlling your local address range is bad for corp networking.
That could claim infinite end points is TUBA, one of the other IPng contenders.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
With IPv6, your computer generates a universally unique ID that allows connections to be sent to your current hotspot.
Radvd allows the prefix to be attacged to your computer's suffix to make a unique IP address.
Dynamic DNS ensures that if your computer is named, the name is usable for your current hotspot endpoint.
MTU discovery ensures that there is zero fragmentation, so no problems with stateless firewalls.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The fact that the mac address is part of the number
That's not a given. It may or may not be. For many auto-assigned IPv6 schemes, it is, but that's not the only way IPv6 addresses are assigned.
IPv4 is optimized for low bandwidth. IPv6 is optimized for high bandwidth. That is the biggest difference apart from the memory address space.
IPv4 came out of a world of dialup. Data arrived slowly and the receiver could easily read byte by byte. This means optimization aims at minimizing the number of bytes in the header and this is done by adding conditional bytes. If a certain variable isn't needed for the header in question, don't add it.
IPv6 is optimized for a world with optic fiber. The header file now includes all data and unused variables are included with default values. While this wastes some bytes in each header, it makes it faster to decode a header, particularly if you just need a certain variable. This is ideal for high throughput routers, particularly in the internet backbone. It can read just the variables it needs to determine the routing for the package. In fact if you want, you can make custom hardware, which can read all the variables at the same time because it can be hardwired to assume the variables at certain bytes in the header buffer. This allows processing more headers each second, which in turn allows more packages, hence more data throughput. The content of the packages aren't processed other than counting as it matches the length variable from the header.
The difference between IPv4 and IPv6 essentially comes down to this and the extra address space. There are some other details that differs, but it's just that: details. IPv6 is not bizarre. If anything, IPv4 is the bizarre one with all the conditional lengths/offsets in the header layout.
To put it into programming perspective, IPv6 is a class with well defined get functions. IPv4 is a class with a bunch of get functions called getA, getB, getC etc and you end up with if getA() > 8, then a = getC() else a = getB(). Sure you can argue that you can use abstraction and make easy to use get functions, which does more than just reading an offset, but that's precisely the point. IPv6 reads one variable and returns it, IPv4 reads multiple variables and does some calculations to figure out which one to return.
Most of that was to placate the unwashed hordes.
Real IPv6, the original specification, had one mode, autoconfigure. No DHCP, no static, just autoconfigure. There was no need for anything else.
(By the eay, IPv4 has RARP, BOOTP as well as static and DHCP, where DHCP may be static or dynamic. And unlike IPv6, you can't mix.)
It's the barbarians who refused the elegant simplicity and demanded to bring over IPv4 detrius that ruined that simplicity.
Real IPv6, original specification, had no fragmentation, no NAT, no forwarding boxes for mobility. Multihoming was one address on one virtual interface.
How much simpler can you get??!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yup, IPv6 is straight forward. However you can't bring over your IPv4 toolbox unchanged. Having NAT with IPv6 is just meaningless and trying to shoehorn it is implies someone either doesn't understand networking or is just trying to retain the old way of doing things.
The biggest hurdle are all the consumer computers and networking equipment that don't use IPv6 by default. So an ISP can't just decide to turn on IPv6 and have it work w/o problems. So you need some translation from an IPv4 NAT to an IPv6 space because the customer boxes will be using IPv4 with NAT. But all of that should be treated as a *transition* phase needed to work in a dual-address world, it should not be treated as the end game.
I was told to stop listening to the Rightwing media, Only people with agenda are conservatives who want to impose their ancient ideas on free Americans who want to grow.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No, we wouldn't have plenty of space. A v4 /8 is only 16 million addresses, and before RIR runout back in 2011 we were going through those /8s in less than a month each. Demand has only gone up since then, and it's reasonable to believe that a v4 /8 would be something around a two-week supply of IPs at today's usage rates. There are only maybe 20 or so /8s held by companies, so that would be less than a year worth of addresses. The v4 space is simply too small, no matter how you slice and dice it.
And don't worry; we did learn our lessons. You don't see anybody giving out /8s in v6, do you? Nobody is getting that large a fraction of the v6 space.
(Expanding TCP wouldn't be any help either. Our problem isn't TCP port numbers, which we have more than enough of; it's IP addresses.)