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Re: European ISP enables IPv6 for all?

  • From: Danny McPherson
  • Date: Tue Dec 18 00:59:52 2007


On Dec 17, 2007, at 10:37 PM, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:


On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:29:21 -0800
"Christopher Morrow" <[email protected]> wrote:

how does it improve data security exactly?

Back in 1994, it was expected to be true because v6 would mandate
IPsec, and v6 would be deployed long before the installed base of v4
machines would be upgraded to IPsec.  Obviously, that's not what
happened; while IPsec was indeed late in coming, v6 was even later, so
the original belief has been OBE.  The mythos, however, hasn't caught
up.  Similar statements can be made about stateless autoconfig vs. v4
DHCP.


Perhaps the concept also holds true because there's a
smaller target market for the moment, and attackers are
all about ROI.  We've certainly seen this at other layers of
the stack.  However, not sure I'd posit as such.

In a slightly more realistic vein, a huge address space makes life
harder for scanning worms.  As Angelos Keromytis, Bill Cheswick, and I
have pointed out, "harder" is by no means equivalent to "impossible",
but the myth, new as it is, still propagates.


As will the worms and malware, I suppose, though perhaps
with more thought-out propagation vectors that employ not
only local prefix scanning, but nifty things like walking
ip6.arpa or the like for presumable denser host existence.
Then again, who needs self propagation, when client-side
attacks seem to be more than sufficient.

-danny