Re: IPv6 support in firewalls

[Shahin Ansari <zohal52 () yahoo com>]

Greetings-
      Let me start by saying it is honor to be able to view your postings.  I have read Marcus book on security, and it 
has been an immense help.  Now to my point:
  -  How is it that ( I have heard ) Asia PAC counties like China have converted to IPv6 already?  Given all the 
security issues you mention ...
   
  -  Some purpose having every device support both stack, what are some of the issues you can run into with this?  CPU 
? 
   
  Regards-
  Sean

"Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr () ranum com> wrote:
  Dave Piscitello wrote:
> I suppose I should begin by answering "why the interest in IPv6?"
> question. Simply put, we are running out of IPv4 addresses (yeah, I
> know, the Sky is Falling, NAT will save us forever...). Based on current
> consumption rates, some folks speculate that the remaining addresses
> not yet distributed by IANA will be exhausted by 2009.

This prediction was made before, if I recall correctly. In 1994. Except
that we were going to run out, uh, in 1999. Yes, the sky is falling, but
it appears to be falling fairly slowly and gently. :)

Perhaps something better than IPv6 will still come along. You know,
like what a few of us suggested back in 1992 - namely doubling
the address size, left-filling with zeroes, and bumping the
version number? ;) Of course everyone screamed that that would
never work because the backbone routers would need gigabytes
of memory and nobody could do something crazy like that. Or
invent CIDR routing or spanning trees or any of the other network
tricks that have come up since 1992 that would have made the
idea workable, practical, and in place and functioning by now...

But, to your real point:
> I'm not convinced we can even meet the
> modest (that's as polite as I can be) security baseline we achieve with
> IPv4 security products with available IPv6 security products. What
> little I've learned in the short time I've spent asking security
> companies about IPv6 support isn't encouraging.

It shouldn't be. Let's see - it took HOW long to even sort out the
most obvious DOS vectors in V4, which was a vastly simpler
protocol. The recent rumblings about problems in V6 indicate
that finding flaws in V6 will be a lot like hunting Passenger
Pigeons was in the 1700's: point your shotgun at the sky and
pull the trigger and several will fall at your feet.

It's a hell of a price to pay for bigger address spaces and
the ego-boost of the IETFniks who get to say they worked on
the next big protocol, huh?

mjr. 

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