IPv10
tools.ietf.org
tools.ietf.org
Lots of crazy things get submitted, and never looked at again. In order for drafts to stay alive they need to be updated with comments every 6 months. Sometimes they lead to things, and sometimes they don't. Usually some IETF working group has to be interested for a draft to go from a draft to an actual RFC.
You can see the status of this draft here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/submit/status/89166/
You can find a list of current drafts here: https://www.ietf.org/download/id-abstract.txt
Given the lack of comments on the draft, and the fact its not actually attached to an IETF working group, its fairly safe to say that this isn't actually going to become a real protocol anytime soon.
- That means, if the received IPv10 packet contains an IPv4
address in the destination address field, the router
should use the IPv4 routing table to make a routing
decision, and if the received IPv10 packet contains an IPv6
address in the destination address field, the router should
use the IPv6 routing table to make a routing decision.
- All Internet connected hosts must be IPv10 hosts to be
able to communicate regardless the used IP version,
and the IPv10 deployment process can be accomplished
by ALL technology companies developing OSs for hosts
networking and security devices.
... also, not all enterprises
devices support IPv6 and also many people are afraid of the service
outage that can be caused due to this migration.
I might be missing something though.
> That means, if the received IPv10 packet contains an IPv4 address in the destination address field, the router should use the IPv4 routing table to make a routing decision, and if the received IPv10 packet contains an IPv6 address in the destination address field, the router should use the IPv6 routing table to make a routing decision.
Most consumer routers don't really maintain routing tables (aside form some static mappings for you internal network) so this appears targetted at actual internet/ISP routers.
<sarcasm> Those big expensive things that we regularly replace and provide with updates. </sarcasm>
Decoding internet packets at scale is usually done inside hardware so at the very least we'll need new ASICs for this I'm guessing.
> [..] and the IPv10 deployment process can be accomplished by ALL technology companies developing OSs for hosts networking and security devices. [..]
Sometime further down the line this shows up though:
> [..] and it is just a software development process in the NIC cards of all hosts to allow encapsulating both IPv4 and IPv6 in the same IP packet header. [..]
I'm not quite sure what the author is getting at but packet encapsulation isn't cheap, you usually don't want to do that in software for large routers, unless they're outfitted with FPGAs for this purpose and you reprogram those instead. I've also never actually seen a firmware update for my NIC show up so I wonder how they envision that happening. Even if that's the case, you'd then still need to update all hosts, which to me seems far from trivial.
We had a strange case recently...some of our remote staff were unable to connect to our NY VPN from SC. After tracing we found their ISP started using IPV6. Anyways, after we made changes...within a few hours the isp went back to IPv4.
Edit - 19 years to switch is a long time...old as the modern internet. Don't fix it if it ain't broken :)
"Each satellite holds routers connected to other routers on other satellites using fiber optic cables"
But yeah, if it's this easy to submit drafts to IETF, how come they haven't drowned in spam already?
Also, interesting snippet near the end of that draft: "Each satellite is connected to an earth station which is connected to the Internet core network on earth." He thinks there's a single "Internet core network" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InternetIncorpora...)? No wonder he thinks it would be easy to forklift upgrade the whole Internet to his new protocol...
Some of his recent efforts:
Satellite Internet [0] (kudos whatidonteven) - I don't think he thought this one through. What is wrong with the current approach? Should we really erect wires in outer space?
He is currently kind of harassing the IETF via mailing lists about IPv10, threatening "If the ideas explained on these drafts will be used, discussed or published by the ietf, legal actions will be taken." [1] - not really how the IETF works.
The version number as "ingenious" 4+6 is annoying, IMO. That's not how version numbers work?
His drawing on his his very own routing protocol - KRP - are also something [2]. Although the quality of his drawings has nothing to do with his ideas per se, it seems he rushed it together in an afternoon.
I don't want to say that he is overestimating his own intelligence, rather that he is underestimating the efforts, hard work and intelligence of everyone else working in this field mostly professionally. His proposals can not easily be judged, because they dismiss almost everything that others have done previously. Why should so many smart people have missed these (obvious/simple) solutions? We are where we are for a reason. You need a good chain of arguments to "dismiss" the current state of the art.
[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-omar-si-00
[1] http://ietf.10.n7.nabble.com/RE-IPv10-KRP-and-RRP-IDs-Remova...
He seems to actually be completly unaware that satellite internet exists at all... (Judging from the second and third points of the introduction).
Who knows what's going on though - maybe he's just young and inexperienced? This is exactly the kind of thing I might have done as a 13 year old if I had stumbled on the IETF...
The Road
6th of October City, Giza
EgyptThe IPv6 address space covers the IPv4 address space already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Representation
> During the transition of the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6, it is typical to operate in a mixed addressing environment. For such use cases, a special notation has been introduced, which expresses IPv4-mapped and IPv4-compatible IPv6 addresses by writing the least-significant 32 bits of an address in the familiar IPv4 dot-decimal notation, whereas all preceding ones are written in IPv6 format. For example, the IPv4-mapped IPv6 address ::ffff:c000:0280 is written as ::ffff:192.0.2.128, thus expressing clearly the original IPv4 address that was mapped to IPv6.
That needs some sort of gateway to work, but I'm assuming that that is the kind of thing your ISP would do for you.
And if you have to convert each IPv4 only host to an IPv10 host to use it, why not convert it to dual stack IPv4/IPv6 instead?
This doesn't look good.
Link to said protocol with pretty pictures
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ipv6-update-global-supp...
Suddenly want to increase the domain from 2^55 to something much higher? Use a 15-byte address where the first 15 bits are 1s and the 16th bit is 0. The rest of the (15*8 - 16 = 104) bits are available.
You get the point - we can arbitrarily increase the size without giving up flexibility.
What's the drawback if we use something like this? Routing troubles? Speed?
Alternative method: the addresses can be as many bits as required, but every bit index that's a multiple of 8 must be 1. The last byte is signified by a byte having 0 at index 0. Basically:
[1]1010110 [1]0001111 [0]1101011
^ last byteThis problem is not one of technical difficulties. There are many protocols that could be designed that are future-proof, efficient, etc.
The issue is entirely social. Everyone needs to use the same protocol(s), so there's a HEAVY emphasis on 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
wow.
The IETF barking out other suggestions is just a distraction.
It's not going to be seriously considered (it doesn't make sense anyway - upgrading to this protocol would be the same effort as upgrading to IPv6 - it's entirely pointless).
The tricky part is router support - BT's own equipment supports it for the most part (Only the Smart Hub and Home Hub 5), but third party routers can be difficult - TPLink still only support /64 prefixes on their current firmware, and their firewall doesn't work properly when using their beta firmware that supports /56 prefixes.
So - the infrastructure is there, but support is variable.
Partly - FTTC is run over BT's network all the way through to 27 regional POPs where it is passed over to the providers network, or they can opt to use the BT network instead.
Most big ISPs run IPv6, and many provide IPv6 to their end customers. In the US Google see 35% of connections coming in to them over IPv6.
But convincing the average small-medium enterprise to enable it on their routers (which isn't automatic as is the case with home connections,) is proving difficult.
We're setting up a new SQL Server cluster, we literally disabled IPv6 in Windows because "we don't use it" - meanwhile I have 6 separate /24's assigned to my team that are a pain in the butt to manage just to ensure I don't run out of addresses. My life would be so much easier if I just had a v6 /64 for dev/test and another /64 for staging and production.
Version numbers are great!
For what it's worth, in IPv4 time there were some experiments with a new IP variant, those got the version 5. You won't find these anywhere in today's networks, but just to be sure, the next official version got number 6.
The opposite is what we see in some programs and libraries: First, they publish version 1.2.2. Then version 1.2.3. But ooops, 1.2.3 had an issue. Well, let's just release a new tarball and label it 1.2.3 as well. Hopefully nobody noticed this. How big are the chances that somebody downloaded the broken package during the past 2 hours? (I guess using another number for the fixed release, such as 1.2.4, would have been too expensive. Or so.)
I am not a fan of using hardware/mac addresses in ip addresses, in my opinion its a big security/privacy issue. Tracking, hardware details leaking etc.
And somehow i think ipv10 will make the migration for some parties even less of a priority or less urge to 'finish' it. I think if they really want to 'promote' and accelerate IPv6 rollout... Facebook and Instagram should have ipv6 days only. E.g. one day in the week or month, you can only connect with facebook/instagram over ipv6; then you'll see how fast endusers will want to be on ipv6 (and once all endusers are dual stacked.. parties can slowly start disabling ipv4 all together). And then i assume the ipv4 only parties will make a bit of a hurry getting their ipv6 in order.
One area where I am keen to see IPv6 spreading is IoT. I don't know if we can ever secure those things, but it will certainly make scanning the IP address space for vulnerable devices impractical.
just use the prefix for reputation. You can assume that each user will have received a /48. Yes. There are some ISPs out there handing out /64's or even a /128, so it might be somewhat too broad, but blacklisting a the whole /48 and then white-listing on (rare) demand is probably the way to go.
Google/Microsoft do this.
They have an even crazier feature that rewrites IPv6 source addresses as random but unique IPv4 addresses for software that can't deal with that: https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-the-last-reasons-to-...
Clearly the IPv6 space doesn't compress 1-1 into the IPv4 space but this gives you way to work with the top 64 bits of the IPv6 address and then feed it into your anti-abuse system. If your abuse system works probabilistically then this isn't too problematic as this becomes just another signal. And IPv4-based systems already deal with multiple people behind the same IP because of NAT.
The feature isn't nuts, but the rationale seems so.
"IPv10 allows hosts from two IP versions (IPv4 and IPv6) to be able to communicate, and this can be accomplished by having an IPv10 packet containing a mixture of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same IP packet header."
IPv4 is the version 4 because former versions of protocols (0 thru 3) are long obsolete; IPv6 is the version 6 because the version 5 was taken by another experimental protocol; and IPv10 ought to be the version 10 because the versions 6 thru 9 were used for proposed successors to IPv4 (and eventually the protocol of version 6 was chosen). I'm not very sure if other assignments were possible in the current standard process though (e.g. up to IPv14 would be available).
[1] https://www.iana.org/assignments/version-numbers/version-num...
Do we really need IPv10?
Aren't hosts expected to choose the highest protocol number they understand? So basically this forever kills (protocol) ipv6 and replaces it with ipv6+ipv4, which is never going to fly (because the "underlying" ipv4 is sunsetting and hopefully gone within a decade)...
Situation: There are 14 competing standards
"14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases." "Yeah!"
Situation: There are 15 competing standards
The whole '15 competing standards' meme only really makes sense when there are 15 competing standards bodies. In the case of IP addresses, there is only one standards body, the IETF. There is one legacy standard (IPv4), one new standard (IPv6), and the only question is how best to ease the transition between the two. I see no problem if that transition relies on an interim protocol.
edit: theoretically, we'll only ever use a fraction of that, both by design and because that's a huge number
Just because the IETF says SLAAC or bust doesn't mean it's true.
I take your point though - it certainly is theoretically (and in practice) possible to doing something other than a /64 - I've just never seen it in the wild.
Obviously not all of these addresses will be used; in practice we aren’t going to run out any time soon.
or
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
IPv4 has 32 bits and lasted us 34 years so far. Let's call it 32 years. Address space would need a nice and tidy 1 bit extra per year. That would mean IPv6 would last until around the year 2110.
But will the internet keep growing exponentially until then? How many people will even be alive by then? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow..., predictions used by the UN range from 7 to 18 billion people. Let's round it up to 20 billion people. How many IPv6 addresses could we give out to each person? According to https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E128+%2F+20*10%5E9, 1.7 * 10^28, which is a lot. But okay, we have a lot of computers per person and not all computers are associated with individuals. So what if we do something crazy, like give out IPv6 addresses to the (human) cells in everybody's body? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.7+*+10%5E28+%2F+cell..., that would be about 1.7 * 10^14. What if we give each cell some IPv6 addresses per second (pretending all of our cells live for 80 years)? https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.7+*+10%5E14+%2F+(80+...
Here we land on 67 thousand addresses, per second, for each human cell in the bodies of 20 billion people, for the span of 80 years.
That's how many IPv6 addresses we'll need to use before we run out.
We have made this mistake before, but 128 bits really is a lot.