IPAM

With all the IPv6 fanfare and press leading up to World IPv6 Launch this past June 6th, after which things quieted down, I've been wondering, has anything happened since? According to ongoing research  conducted by the England Chapter of the Internet Society published on the RIPE NCC website , most countries worldwide have experienced higher IPv6 penetration as measured in August, 2012 vs. June, 2012. In fact, the U.S. experienced the largest percentage increase in IPv6 penetration over the period, leaping from 6.17% to 11.46%! The research project is dubbed the IPv6 Matrix Project, and full details about the project can be found on its website . In a nutshell, the system attempts an "IPv6 crawl" by looking up DNS records for the top one million websites (and then some) according to Alexa. The system uses DNS results to initiate connection attempts to email, web and time servers. The IPv6 Matrix website home page displays a world map, which I assume displays the very ...

I used the metaphor of dominos in a prior post to illustrate the close inter-relationship among IPv4 address suppliers, namely IANA, each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Up til now, the "initial domino" fell with IANA depleting its available IPv4 space in early February, 2011. This event was followed only two months later by the APNIC, the RIR serving the Asia Pacific region, to fall next when it reported that it had entered the final phase of its IPv4 allocation policy with only its final /8 of IPv4 space remaining. Today, the European RIR, the RIPE NCC, announced that it too has now begun making allocations from its final /8 of IPv4 address space. The clock is ticking on IPv4 address space. Unfortunately, it's inevitable. IPv4 space will no longer be available for allocation anywhere at a time in the not too distant future. Even if you have plenty of IPv4 address space, the complexion of the Internet will continue to m...

On the heels of my most recent post asking, " How many IPv6 eyeballs are you missing? ," I now pose the analogous question for DNSSEC. Do your DNS servers receive queries requesting authenticated resource record data for your namespace? If so, and you have not signed your zones, then DNSSEC validators' requests for authentication will go unfulfilled. And their DNS caches they are attempting to protect from poisoning will go unprotected, not to mention the integrity of your DNS namespace. An attacker "impersonating" your namespace could redirect browsers to the attackers' website for example by providing DNS resolvers with falsified query answers using cache poisoning attacks such as those publicized by Dan Kaminsky . On the other hand, if hardly any resolvers (i.e., caching servers) initiating queries on the Internet even perform DNSSEC validation, signing your zones will offer value only to a small number of deployed validators and no value to non-validat...

Here's my post for the Team ARIN blog : Many organizations have expressed skepticism about deploying IPv6. But they need to understand that the issue is not how much IPv4 address space they have, but how much is available for global distribution. As IPv4 exhausts around the world over time, a new generation of web users possessing only IPv6 addresses will materialize and grow substantially. But when will this new generation of Internet users appear in numbers? Many service providers are masking an indeterminate number of these users due to the necessity of providing them access to both IPv6 and IPv4 web content. This makes it difficult to gauge IPv6 client requests on a global scale, but you can actually measure this, albeit coarsely, on your own web presence. Let’s see how. Presumably, service providers with IPv6-addressed subscribers will attempt to connect using native IPv6 end-to-end if possible, but drop back to using an IPv4-IPv6 co-existence technology suc...