North American Network Operators Group
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Re: European ISP enables IPv6 for all?

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Wed Dec 19 10:58:46 2007

On 19 dec 2007, at 16:16, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

I'd say that the huge address space makes life impossible for scanning
worms.

That doesn't mean that there can be no successful scanning at all with
IPv6, but it needs to be highly targeted if you want results the same
year, so just pumping random numbers in the destination address field
like SQL slammer did so successfully doesn't cut it in IPv6. 

Just so we're all thinking about it; the issue isn't the size of the
address space, it's the sparseness of populated addresses.  That won't
*necessarily* always be true.

Well, if you can scan the whole space (at 15 kpps 80 hours for the entire IPv4 space although with random generation it's going to take longer than that) sparseness isn't a huge issue. If you can't scan the whole space (at 15 kpps 7.1 x 10^26 years for the entire IPv6 space) then sparseness becomes a consideration. But I still don't see how random scanning is going to do you much good: either so few IPv6 hosts are vulnerable that scanning for them isn't worth the time, or so many that if you can scrape some IPv6 addresses from the web you can infect those and they'll infect all the networks they connect to (scanning a LAN locally is easy).