[kictanet] [Fwd: [AfrICANN-discuss] Vint Cerf warns on IPv6 uptake]

alice alice at apc.org
Thu Oct 23 20:37:35 EAT 2008


Vint Cerf warns on IPv6 uptake


      You have until mid-2010, says Google sage.


          Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service
          21 October 2008

The Internet will get support for IPv6, a more secure domain name system 
and international characters, during the next couple of years, according 
to Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google.

"This year and the next year are probably the most significant years for 
Internet's evolution that I can remember," said Cerf, who was one of the 
keynote speakers at the Internetdagarna (The Internet Days) conference 
in Stockholm.

The biggest change is the move to IPv6, which will give the Internet a 
much larger address space and ensure future growth. The current estimate 
is that the number of IPv4 addresses that can be allocated will be 
exhausted around the middle of 2010, according to Cerf.

"It's slowly entering into the network, but people haven't felt very 
much pressure up until now to implement it," said Cerf.

But the deadline is coming closer, and it's becoming more apparent to 
many people that it's time to start implementing IPv6 in parallel with 
IPv4, according to Cerf.

Besides its 128-bit address space, IPv6 has other benefits. "One of them 
is that if the other side says I need to go into encrypted mode you are 
supposed to comply with that, it's optional in IPv4," said Cerf.

There are also some problems, the network management tools are for 
example not yet as mature the ones for IPv4, according to Cerf.

He says the current lack of addresses, and the IPv4 32-bit address 
space, is his fault. "My only defence is that decision was made in 1977, 
at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," said Cerf, 
and adding that a 128-bit address space seemed excessive back then.

But IPv6 isn't the only project that will keep the industry busy. The 
implementation of domain name system security using DNSSEC (Domain Name 
System Security Extensions) has also got off the ground.

"The idea here is to improve the assurance that when you do a domain 
name hookup you get back the IP address that was intended, as opposed to 
something that was modified by a hacker," said Cerf.

If the DNSSEC is supposed to improve security on the Internet, the 
addition of internationalised domain names (the support for non-Latin 
character sets) is supposed to make it a more global place. Languages 
such as Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on, 
will all become a part of the domain name systems vocabulary, according 
to Cerf.

"This is a big change, because for the last 30 years the only thing you 
could use was Latin characters, and just the letters A though Z, digits 
0 to 9 and a hyphen," said Cerf.

There is still a lot to be done to make the Internet more useful than it 
is today. Broadcast and support for multihoming, which can make it 
convenient for users to have more than one ISP, are two areas where 
there is room for improvement, according to Cerf.

"So we have lots of potential, new designs to add to the Internet to 
make it more functional and effective than it is today," said Cerf.

This article was printed from Techworld : www.techworld.com 
<http://www.techworld.com/>
The UK's infrastructure & network knowledge centre
© 2008 : All rights reserved

-- 
Anne-Rachel Inne

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