Defense Department begins six months of IPv6 interoperability tests

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/story/0,10801,86243,00.html

Story by Linda Rosencrance 
OCTOBER 20, 2003 
COMPUTERWORLD

For the next six months, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) will
operate the largest multivendor IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6)  
network to date.

Today, the North American IPv6 Task Force announced that the network,
dubbed the Moonv6 project, has been deployed to evaluate
next-generation Internet technology to support network-centric
military operations.

The DOD has said it will migrate its existing Global Information Grid
Network, based at University of New Hampshire, to the new IPv6 network
by 2008.

"Future combat and defense systems need network ubiquity, mobility and
security that the current Internet protocol, IPv4, cannot provide,"  
said Maj. Roswell Dixon, Joint Interoperability Testing Command
tactical data systems/IPv6 test director at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in a
statement. "The lack of security and flexibility in the current
protocol has hampered efforts to build next-generation secure
communications."

In a telebriefing on Oct. 17, Dixon said the IPv6 project was
groundbreaking for the Defense Department. "This is the first time
we've had representation from all the services" in a test of the new
protocol, he said.

The Moonv6 project is a collaboration among industry, engineering and
several DOD organizations and is designed to examine the
interoperability of IPv6 equipment, software and services under
real-world conditions.

The Interoperability Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire
(UNH-IOL) just completed the Moonv6 project's initial interoperability
and test period, which ran from Oct. 7 to 17. The goal is to keep
Moonv6 up and running permanently as the North American IPv6 backbone.

One of the major factors driving the move from the IP Version 4 now in
use to to IPv6 is a perceived scarcity of IP addresses for new devices
such as Internet-enabled mobile phones. IPv4 addresses are 32 bits
long, enough for around 4 billion unique addresses, although
inefficiencies in the division and allocation of the address space
means that many of these aren't available for use.

IPv6 extends the address length to 128 bits, or around 340 billion
billion billion billion unique addresses.

While governments and network operators in Europe and Asia have been
conducting large-scale tests of IPv6 for the last three years, the
U.S. response to IPv6 has been "lackluster," according to the Web site
of Moon's organizers. And the country is still playing catch-up: The
DOD tests were originally due to begin on Oct. 3 and finish Oct. 17,
but haven't yet begun, according to information provided by the
organizers.

Participants in the Moon tests include the DOD, the UNH-IOL, the North
American IPv6 Task Force, several networking software and equipment
vendors including IBM, Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco
Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Nokia Corp., as
well as Japan-based network operator Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
Corp., according to a statement issued today.

Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service contributed to this report.



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