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There’s no way in which IPv6 is less private than IPv4. An ISP issues your house an IPv4 address and an IPv6 /48 network. Both of those can be subpoenaed equally. The privacy extensions work as advertised.
And in reality land, the big companies are the ones pushing for the upgrade because they’re the ones hardest hit by IPv4’s inherent limitations and increasing costs. Same rando in Tampa isn’t leading the charge because it doesn’t affect them much either way.
With IPv4 behind CGNAT you share an address with hundreds of other users. This won't protect you against a targeted subpoena, but tracking companies typically don't have this kind of power, so they have to resort to other fingerprinting options.
On the other hand, an IPv6 address is effectively a unique, and somewhat persistent, tracking ID, 48/56/64-bit long (ISP dependent), concatenated with some random garbage. And of course every advertiser, every tracking company and their dog know which part is random garbage; you are not going to fool anyone by rotating it with privacy extensions.
For tracking purposes, an IPv6 address is 48 bits long. That’s what identifies a customer premise router, exactly like a IPv4 /32 identifies one. The remaining 80 random bits might as well be treated like longer source port numbers: they identify one particular connection but aren’t persistent and can’t map back to a particular device behind that router afterward.
For some reason, "CGNAT == privacy" is a very common sentiment on Hacker News. Yeah, Hacker News. It's bewildering, and after my last comment [0] talking about it, I have kinda already given up trying to convince people that CGNAT is devilish and not at all a privacy protector.
With NAT, an adversary can't send my computer any packets either unless I explicitly set up port mappings.
So, if you can't send my computer any packets, how is it not providing security?
Of course, it doesn't provide full security like a firewall can do, since there's ways to punch holes in the NAT from the inside. But it seems just as incorrect to fully dismiss "NAT == security".
NAT provides some functional security. It is not a replacement for a proper firewall.
Because if those nice IoT devices were reachable from the internet they could be compromised easily due to their likely shitty firmware with backdoors and hardcoded passwords.
> Trusting on NAT alone is idiotic and foolish.
Sure, but that's a far cry from saying NAT provides no security.
Perhaps this is the difference, some people are concerned with being anonymous from companies like google, amazon, etc. Some don't mind that, as long as they are anonymous from a government.
Your mention of subpoena suggests you don't care about google tracking you.
Some public evidence: https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/google-lays-off-c...
The people I want to protect my privacy from are google, facebook, amazon, they can't subpoena my IP, they can track me just fine though.
The tracking is a moot point. You can be tracked using the same technologies whether you connect though v4 or v6, and neither stack has the advantage there.
It, um. No, it doesn't do that. You can use proxies and VPNs in v6, and you're about as trackable by IP as you are on v4.
Either you use address translation or you don't.
VPNs as a youtube sold service. Mullvad/mozillavpn for one
I get an IP of fc00:bbbb:bbbb:bb01::1 and it uses NAT66 to place me in New York despite being in the UK
1.|-- fc00:bbbb:bbbb:bb01::1 0.0% 10 78.6 80.2 78.6 82.0 1.2
2.|-- 2607:9000:a000:34::1 0.0% 10 80.1 80.3 79.3 81.2 0.7
3.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
4.|-- 2607:f740:70:101::1 0.0% 10 82.2 83.9 79.8 104.3 7.2
5.|-- 2001:550:2:d::4a:1 90.0% 10 80.1 80.1 80.1 80.1 0.0
6.|-- be3448.agr22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (2001:550:0:1000::9a36:1a9) 60.0% 10 80.4 81.0 79.2 82.9 1.5
And no, proxies were either never obsoleted or they were obsoleted by routing. Nothing to do with v6.
I’m aka unsure if IPv4 really gets you the privacy advantages you think it does. Your IP address is a data point, but the contents of your TCP/HTTP traffic, your browser JS runtime, and your ISP are typically the more reliable ways to identify you individually.
The downvotes are because you’re needlessly combative, preemptively complaining about downvotes.
Realistically though there's enough fingerprinting in browsers to track you regardless of your public IP and whether it's shared between every device in the house or if you dole out a routable ipv4 to every device.
CG-NAT gives more privacy benefits as you have more devices behind the same IP, but the other means of tracking still tend to work.
For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface. Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work. I still don't see any benefit to me, the user.
Yes, browser fingerprinting is a big issue, but it can be mitigated. The first thing everyone should do is to use a network-wide DNS blacklist against all known trackers (e.g. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists) and run uBlock Origin in the browser.
You can go further and restrict third party scripts in uBlock, or even all scripts. This will break at lot of websites, but it is a surefire way to prevent fingerprinting.
Then of course there is Tor.
This one was particularly scary: https://malwaretech.com/2024/08/exploiting-CVE-2024-38063.ht...
Sigh...
Yep. For the OP, IPv6 "Privacy" addresses do what he's looking for. You can change how long they're valid for on Linux, so you can churn through them very frequently if you wish.
> Every year or two I move onto my ipv6 vlan and last a few hours before something doesn't work.
Odd. I've been using IPv6 for like fifteen, twenty years now with no trouble at all. If you've been using a "single stack" IPv6-only network, well, there's your problem.
> For me I just don't see the appeal of supporting both ipv4 and ipv6. It means a larger attack surface.
The attack surface with IPv6 is exactly as large as if each of your LAN hosts had a globally-routable IPv4 address. Thinking otherwise is as smart as thinking that the attack surface on a host increases linearly with the number of autoconfigured IPv6 addresses assigned to that host from the same subnet.
If you don't want the IPv6 hosts on your LAN to be reachable by unsolicited traffic, set the default policy for your router's ip6tables FORWARD chain to DROP, and ACCEPT forwarded packets for ESTABLISHED or RELATED connections. If you're not using ip6tables, do whatever is the equivalent in the firewall software you're using. If you know that you have rules in your FORWARD chain that this change would break, then you already knew that you could simply drop unsolicited traffic in the FORWARD chain.
Unrelated to that, I see no reason to get rid of IPv4.
I expect that the future will be that nearly all "residental" [0] and non-datacenter business connections provide globally-routable IPv6 service and provide IPv4 via CGNAT, as IPv6 will be used for servers deployed at these sorts of sites. [1] I expect that the future will be that all datacenters and "clouds" will provide globally-routable IPv6 to servers and VMs, and globally-routable IPv4 to the same by way of load balancers.
So, home servers [1] will use IPv6, datacenter and "cloud" servers will use IPv4 and IPv6, and "legacy" devices that work fine but will never have their IP software updated will use IPv4.
I see IPv6 as a "reduce the pressure on the IPv4 address pool" mechanism, rather than a "replace IPv4" system. Again, I see no reason to get rid of "short" IP addresses. Default to using "long" ones, and keep the "short" ones around just in case.
[0] I'm including people's personal mobile computers in this definition of "residential".
[1] "Servers" here include things like "listen" video game servers or short-lived servers for file transfers and stuff like that.
"IPv6 just turned 30" - literally the first part of the post title.
The rest of the post is equally baffling, you are just clinging to a legacy bottleneck (NAT) that was never designed to be a security feature
It's virtually always used with some firewall rules, so it sort of is? It's just dogma to insist that there are no security benefits to having a single choke point for traffic.
NAT also include many-to-many and one-to-one translations, and those are just as easily implemented in anything routing with no extra memory and complexity required. This is sometimes referred to as symmetric NAT.
The firewall rules are what is providing the protection, by applying a policy that traffic must be initiated by a host on the "more trusted" network or whatever your prefered terminology is. That can happen without NAT and does all the time. Techniques for forcing translations have been well known as long as NAT, and there are probably some unobvious ones out there too. In the 1990s it was still common to get multiple IPv4 addresses if you went to the trouble of having ISDN or whatever, and they were equally protected by a firewall that did not do NAT.
Take a look at the IPv6 Google graph that everyone loves so much:
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
You can clearly see an initial steep spike to the curve where mobile adoption was new and fierce, and then the curve starts slowly becoming less steep over the last 10 years. It will peter out and remain steady when mobile device adoption reaches critical mass.
Mobile and Telco ISPs are the only ones not issueing IPv4 addresses to their clients and this will never change.
Saying NAT 'Won Out' may have been a bit of a flippant overreacting statement which I apologise for, but IPv6 will never replace IPv4 outside of the mobile space and that was my core point I was (poorly) trying to make.
You mean the single largest increase in deployed computing devices in the history of computing and fastest growing type of deployment in the developing world? That mobile device space?
It’s amazing to me that you’ve spent hours arguing this point on this thread, when it‘s based on an assumption (dual-stack machines use v4 by default) that is simply, verifiably wrong. If that were true, then you’d be right that nearly all IPv6 usage is attributable to mobile. But it’s not true!