Fergie's Tech Blog

Migration to IPv6 Could Cause Network Problems, Threaten Cyber Security

Erin Kelly writes on SearchSecurity:

The move to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) could have a profound affect on the Internet, breaking it up into islands of connectivity and threatening cybersecurity in the process, according to Jeff Young, a senior analyst at the Burton Group.

As the IPv4 free address pool continues to dwindle, enterprises can expect to see IPv6-only hosts on the Internet within a three-year timeframe, Young said. In the report, "IPv4 Address Exhaustion: An Inconvenient Truth," Young addresses the incompatibility of IPv4 and IPv6 and some of the problems that need to be addressed during the changeover.

"The biggest problem I see right now with security is that there are not a lot of well-informed networking people or security people with regard to IPv6," Young said in an interview with SearchSecurity.com.

In 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) designated IPv6 as the successor to version 4. But adoption has been slow with currently less than 1% of all Internet traffic on IPv6, according to statistics released by Google. For some time, IPv6 was considered a security threat due to the many net tunnels used to connect to IPv6. Some operating systems automatically create these tunnels, allowing them to go undetected by security systems, Young said.

posted by Fergie @ 1/26/2009 10:29:00 AM