World IPv6 Day draws attention to security issues with new protocol

Computerworld - The marking of World IPv6 Day yesterday has drawn fresh attention to the next-generation Internet addressing protocol, as well as to the security considerations that enterprises will need to deal with as they migrate to it.

IPv6 is an IP address standard designed to replace the current IPv4 protocol, which has been in use since the 1980s for routing Internet traffic. The new protocol has been available for several years now and supports several magnitudes more address spaces than IPv4, while also providing better security and reliability.

Even so, few companies have upgraded to it because of the perceived complexity in doing so. That is expected to start quickly changing, though, because the IPv4 protocol has almost run out of unique IP addresses for all the websites, computers and other devices that are connecting to the Internet on a daily basis.

World IPv6 Day is an attempt by a group of major Internet brands, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and about 200 other smaller companies to test it, and to get network vendors, ISPs, software makers and enterprises to start thinking about moving to it.

As of midday Wednesday, the testing appeared to be going without a hitch, with none of those participating in the effort reporting any significant problems, said John Curran, chief executive of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN).

"It has been a remarkable success," Curran said.

Arbor Networks, which is providing network monitoring support for the test, on Wednesday noted a modest uptick in native IPv6 data. "We are not seeing a huge increase in IPv6 traffic," said Rob Malan, chief technology officer at Arbor. But the testing appears to be going "without a hiccup," he said.

The real test of the IPv6 protocol, however, will come when companies start migrating to it in earnest in the next few years, several analysts and vendor representatives said on Wednesday.

"When it comes to upgrading the Internet in place, there are a lot of moving parts to consider," Earl Zmijewski, general manager of Internet monitoring firm Renesys, said in a blog post.

The moving parts include end-user operating systems, home networks, routers, firewalls, servers, Internet service providers and applications, Zmijewski said. "Despite all the transition planning that has been carried out to date, a lot can go wrong," he wrote.

Many of the problems are likely to stem from the simple facts that IPv6 is far newer and untested compared with IPv4, and that the two protocols will need to coexist for several years.

One of the biggest potential threats lies in the immaturity of the various implementations of the protocol, said Noa Bar Yosef, senior security strategist at Imperva.