America's Quest for IPv6 - A Business Perspective.

America's Quest for IPv6: A Business Perspective On January 31st 2006, during his televised State of the Union address, the President of the United States announced an initiative that would enhance the United States' ability to compete globally, generating new jobs and raising our standard of living. Called the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), its goal is to ensure that America remains the world's economic leader. ACI is an ambitious and positive effort that can have a tremendous positive impact on US economic efforts. And, doubtless, it will be revised, refined, and rewritten as it bumps along partisan channels for the next two years.

Regardless of the political process, however, what makes this initiative especially compelling, transcending even its ambitious objective, is the impetus behind its conception. The President alluded to the "rise of new competitors, like China" that are making "great strides" in technology. China--a country where the concept of non-cash transactions, or consumer credit, has gained acceptance only over the last five years--is now making great strides in technology. What technology is fueling these strides? Nano-technology advancements? Biometric security? Micro-processor circuitry? No, no, and no. It's IPv6: The next generation Internet Protocol.

IPv6, packed with promise of superior security, scale, and reliability, is already available to forward-thinking countries like China, as well as corporations wanting to sustain an advantage over their competitors. Despite this promise, only now has America begun taking steps towards a transition to IPv6, and still our nation struggles to see the overwhelming value this upgrade all but guarantees. This paper emphasizes that American organizations must adopt IPv6 today. It describes the features and functions that will keep them competitive on the global stage, offering a level of technological empowerment essential for any company's--or any country's--continued economic success.

IPv6: A Short Introduction

Internet Protocol Version 4, or IPv4, was designed in the 1970's by forward-thinking people like Vint Cerf, John Postel, Bob Kahn, and Leonard Kleinrock. It was designed in an age before eBay and Amazon, before our mothers had email and our children could blog. IPv4 was, in fact, designed to facilitate communications between research laboratories, and as such, remained contained within a small collection of universities and government labs. Back then, the designers of the first Internet Protocol envisioned at best only several thousand computing devices being linked together. The first message ever sent over the Internet was, in fact, such a modest transmission that it didn't even leave the state of California. It went from node 1 at UCLA in Los Angeles to node 2 at Stanford University, crossing the very area that would soon become the heart of Silicon Valley. The technology's performance was so tenuous, in fact that the first message, sent by John Postel, was simply "LO". Postel had been trying to send the command "LOGIN", but the network crashed as he typed the second character. Despite these temperamental beginnings, the Internet that these leaders envisioned is still the very same Internet that we are using today. That means that it is built on a protocol more than 30 years old! It was absolutely never designed for our current cell phones, PDAs, and RFID tags. Today, it is quite simply breaking under the stress. We now have more unique computing objects in the world than the entire population of the planet. The short answer to this reality is that IPv4 needs to be replaced with a modern, next-generation Internet Protocol that can accommodate the need for more devices, faster speeds, greater mobility, enhanced connectivity, integrated security, enforceable privacy, and easier management.

Fortunately, in 1994, the current framers of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, began the process of developing this next-generation protocol with the publication of RFC 1719 (Gross, 1994), entitled "A Direction for IPng."

Throughout the next decade, experts from around the world would work on these concepts, forming our fundamental platform for the future, called IPv6.

The biggest difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is increased address space. IPv6 accomplishes this by increasing the address field size from 32 bits to 128 bits. This made it possible to move from about 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses (which seemed plenty back in the 70's) to over 3.4*1038 addresses--an almost incomprehensible 3.4 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion (or 340 undecillion)! With all this increased space, not only are desired new features and functions such as fixed IP addresses and mobile/data/video convergence possible, but entire economies, even those with over 1.3 billion residents, can build an infrastructure to support tomorrow's technology, today.

China, and Others, Embrace IPv6

When the Internet was first deployed, there were only three sized blocks of addresses that could be obtained. The largest of these was a Class A (/8 block), which was issued to the early adopters such as the major U.S. universities, and some large corporations that were working on the development and deployment of the early Internet. Each Class A accommodated 16 million addresses. A legacy of that early land grab for address space (under the IPv4 model, un-needed addresses can not be recycled), is that Stanford University has more contiguous address space than the entire Peoples Republic of China (Ohira, 2003). For countries around the world to fully develop an information-based economy, a new system with substantial new addresses needed to be created.

In 2000, China adopted the IPv6 specification as the basis for their new country-wide information infrastructure. They outlined an eight-year plan that took them from almost no practical infrastructure, to the goal of being the number one information infrastructure country in the world by 2008. China has also made it clear that it is committed to using this infrastructure to become an economic superpower in the same time frame. As China began to invest in IPv6, other Asian nations followed suit. Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all have already met their IPv6 pledges (Fink, 2002). The result is that Asia is further ahead in information infrastructure than the west. Many in the west erroneously dismissed IPv6 as an 'Asian' issue. This short-sighted assessment has only put them deeper in the hole.

Today, the majority of Asia is committed and well on their way to deployment of an IPv6-based information infrastructure. Not only do these nations now enjoy the practically limitless availability of IP addresses, but they are also fully leveraging the lower costs of deployment and management, greater security and privacy, better connectivity with converged devices, faster speeds for real-time data such as voice and video, and many other advantages.

Europe recognized these realities in 2002, and the European Union has been investing heavily in order to catch up in this race for information supremacy. The U.S. has no such organization, and as such, is not yet enjoying government seed capital for IPv6 transition investments. The U.S. does have some advantages left, however. The Department of Defense has mandated that all information products and services that it buys from 2008 on must be IPv6 compliant. That huge buying power is just now starting to push the defense marketplace. Additionally, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (Evans, 2005) and the General Accounting Office (GAO) (Powner, 2005), have issued circulars compelling all of the civilian agencies to follow suit by 2008 as well.

So while IPv6 is quickly becoming integrated outside the U.S., here there is still an unacceptable air of mystery about IPv6 and the benefits it promises. Let's clear the air, and take a look at the practical, irrefutable areas of IPv6 impact.

Key Impact Areas

While no one has a crystal clear picture of a future with IPv6, we know it packs significant impact for government, business and consumers. Looking ahead, three of the most critical areas of impact are mobility, security and virus protection, and real-time/peer-to-peer applications.

Mobility

IPv6 Mobility is all about our growing need to stay connected while on the move. This can be something as simple as staying connected as you drive across town, or as complicated as maintaining your always-on broadband connection as you fly from Washington to Frankfurt. With IPv6's mobility capabilities, it is possible for two nodes to communicate peer to peer without breaking the connection, even while moving across network boundaries. This is critical for being able to maintain state, which allows you to maintain your identification, authentication, privacy and security as you roam from node to node. Think about logging on to your server from Starbucks, then driving to work, then flying to California, then arriving at your hotel, all without breaking your secured connection. Now add in the use of your PDA, mobile phone, RFID tags in your passport, and the shared computer in the Internet cafe, and you'll see a growing need for mobility. With IPv6, it is possible for everyone to be connected in a transparent fashion everywhere, whether they are using their PC in the office, their phone in their car, their PDA in the subway, or a network built into their car.

Security and Virus Protection

Most security savvy users of IPv4 consider their use of Network Address Translation (NAT) boxes to be their security blanket. In their mind, they 'hide behind' these boxes and rely on the fact that they do not have a permanent IP address to be tracked. In fact, this global network of NATs is very costly, both in dollars and throughput, and not very secure at all. Since almost all packets that traverse a NAT are modified by design, the Internet's original concept of End-to-End security is impossible. NATs require over encapsulation which enlarges the packets, and requires applications to now integrate the NATs into their own code base. Today, most users connected to the Internet are on a borrowed IP address. Even if you leave your DSL connection 'always on', your ISP will rotate your IP address every 24 hours. With IPv6, since you no longer need NATs and you can/will maintain your IP address, additional security was built in. P/Sec, the gold standard for IP security in the v4 world, has been fully adopted and embedded within IPv6, where it defaults on. This provides much stronger security than hiding behind NATs, offering all of the advantages that Authenticated Headers (AH) and Encapsulated Payloads

(ESP) can provide, while also maintaining state no matter where you go or what you do.

Finally, the sheer volume of new IPv6 address makes today's viruses a thing of the past (of course, new methods will be invented and dealt with in their own time).

Today, it takes a modern virus about 10 hours to scan the entire IPv4 address space looking for targets. Under IPv6, that same virus would take dozens of years to find that very same target. While security is not perfect in either the v4 or v6 world, with IPv6 we finally have the End-To-End connection restored, which gives security control back to the users where it belongs.

Real-Time/Peer-to-Peer

One of the realities of our Internet is our need for real-time applications. Voice over IP offers huge economies, yet the quality is still not quite there. Video over IP is desired in every household across America, yet the small size box with its choppy movements still lacks commercial appeal. Most mobile phones now have beautiful screens capable of showing live video; it's too bad that the data can't get there in time.

One way to approach the problem is simply to continue to build bigger and faster pipes, to handle all of this data. If VoIP is sketchy in your office, today's CIO would be forced to buy additional throughput with T1s, T3s, or other high speed and very expensive links. And still the calls could sound bad if there are bottle necks further down the path.

IPv6 offers us a better way to route real-time information, that doesn't require us to build and buy new bandwidth. IPv6 has added a Flow Control field in the header that has the potential for classifying traffic, such that real-time packets could be routed first, while a store and forward packet like part of an email would step aside and let it go by. This allows us to make much more efficient use of the equipment that is already in place.

Finally, because IPv6 has re-established the End-to-End connectivity, and no longer requires NAT boxes in between, upside speed is no longer constrained. On the Chinese backbone now, they have fiber links providing 2.5 Gigabits from end-to-end, but when they reintroduce their old NAT boxes their performance maxes out at only 800Mbps.

So is IPv6 Ready for Prime Time?

Microsoft thinks so, as do Apple, Cisco, HP, Sun and dozens of other companies, which is why they ship the IPv6 stack, or data structure, with every operating system that they now sell. Your ISP thinks so, which is why they started linking into the IPv6 root servers this summer. In Europe, they've set 2006 to have a significant level of deployment. Certainly countries and companies in Asia think so, as they are relying on it to help vault them ahead of America in terms of information infrastructure.

Now is right time to be investing in IPv6 in America. New companies will spring forth, that help companies leverage the new capabilities that come free with wide-spread adoption of IPv6, not simply rehash the old way of doing things. Better ways to create a virtual private network (VPN), for employees, partners, and customers will prosper. Smarter ways to defend against online identity theft, both yours and your customers will spring forth. Safer ways to ensure the privacy of all your data no matter where it travels will be developed. These companies that successfully transition to IPv6 will have no baggage, no install base to protect, and can bring us the very best that the standard was created to deliver.

Transition

Everyone wants and needs a smooth transition from IPv4 to IPv6. This is not going to happen overnight, and in fact, both stacks will most probably run side by side for the next decade. (The IETF has worked diligently to provide adopters numerous choices by which they can integrate IPv6 while still leveraging their IPv4 infrastructure.)

For the transition to begin in America, three things need to be in place. First, the primary stack on personal computers must use IPv6, and provide for the fully integrated use of the IPv6 packet. To their credit, Microsoft (Mitchell, 2005) has decided that the default stack for their next generation Windows operating system called Vista (it's old code name was LongHorn), which begins shipping in later this year, will be IPv6. Once American organizations begin upgrading to this new version (and before you crack wise about Microsoft and new versions, look at their market share!), they will be able to begin to leverage these new features and functions. Given corporate America's history of O/S upgrades, it is expected that most large U.S. organizations will have the ability to originate and terminate IPv6 packets in 2008.

The second thing that needs to be in place is the corporate routers. Routers need to be able to understand and route an IPv6 packet when it sees one. Most routers sold by both Cisco and Juniper over the past couple of years have already had this ability built in. With router-life times in the 5 year range, that indicates that most large organizations would have the ability to route an IPv6 packet from anywhere to anywhere on their own network by around 2008.

The third and final thing that is required for corporate America to fully leverage the new features and functions of IPv6 are the Tier One telecom providers. Companies are not islands, and rely on the ability to move it's packets from anywhere inside their net, to anywhere in their trading partner's network. Luckily for them, more than half of the world's Tier One telecom providers can now route a v6 packet from anywhere in their cloud to anywhere in their cloud. By 2008, more than 90 percent should have rolled out this capability, as there are no longer any technical issues, and they are only awaiting demand.

Conclusion

IPv6 will slowly be integrated into corporate America, into their operating systems, into their routers, and into their ISPs. This will happen in sufficient force by 2008, and CIOs will then have a choice to make: They can ignore the new features and functions being fully leveraged by their partners and competitors abroad, which cost them nothing to deploy, and which provide the means to address their most serious pain points such as security, privacy, efficiency, and mobility--or they can decide to start taking advantage of what they have already bought.

IPv6 is not something new that they have to buy. IPv6 is complex and needs to be understood, and then strategies can be crafted that save money and provide better service to employees and customers alike.

IPv6 is real, global, free, and available. Corporate America needs its features and functions. Embracing IPv6 will ensure that the United States re-gains its status at the forefront of technological innovation, and remains the world's economic leader.

References

Evans, K. (2005, August 2). OMB Transition Planning for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). Retrieved November 1, 2005, from www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/fy2005/m05-22.pdf Fink, B. (2002, July 17). 6bone address registry proposal. Retrieved October 11, 2005, from http://www.6bone.net/ngtrans/IETF-54-Yokohama/6boneregistry.pdf Gross, P. (1994, December). A Direction for IPng. Retrieved October 12, 2005, from http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/rfc/rfc1719.txt

http://www.commandinformation.com

By Tom Patterson

CEO, Command Information

Tom Patterson - CEO

Tom Patterson is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Command Information and a leading business advisor in the areas of security, technology, and governance. Most recently, he founded the IPv6 Business Council on behalf of the global IPv6 community, and published a critically acclaimed book, Mapping Security, on information security, privacy and governance around the world.