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New IPv6 protocol may be slower





 The survey, "The 2012 BT Diamond IP IPv6 Industry Survey", shows that 13 percent of organizations have already deployed IPv6 in all or part of their networks, growing significantly with respect to 2011, when the percentage stood at 5 per cent.



Another 44 percent of respondents plan to deploy IPv6 in the next two years, taking into account the growth of the Internet and the rapid depletion of addresses IPv4, the previous system of addressing on the Internet.


Overall, 55 percent of respondents agreed "the deployment of IPV6 is necessary across my network", which reveals that the majority of organizations will not display satisfied with having IPV6 only in a part of its infrastructure and will seek to adopt more broadly to take advantage of all its benefits.



The problem with the new system is that it is not compatible with IPv4, but that works in parallel, creating an independent Internet which now exists. Thus, to go from a site that is in IPv4 to one that is in IPv6, systems of "translation" are required. It is expected that both systems operate in parallel for many years even before that we change all to IPv6.


So far, everything seems to go wind in its sails, and Akamai reported a large increase in the use of IPv6 in North America, Europe and Asia. In Australia and South America are far more shutdown.


 IPv6 protocol features
IP addresses use a numbering system hexadecimal, where letters A to F in the spaces are used between 10 to 15. This has allowed some companies to entertain a little with the addresses and we have examples like the following Facebook at 2620: 0: 1c08:4000: face:b00c: 0: 1 or Cisco in 2001: 420: 80: 1: c:15c0: d06:f00d.

 
IP addresses use a numbering system hexadecimal, where letters A to F in the spaces are used between 10 to 15. This has allowed some companies to entertain a little with the addresses and we have examples like the following Facebook at 2620: 0: 1c08:4000: face:b00c: 0: 1 or Cisco in 2001: 420: 80: 1: c:15c0: d06:f00d.



It is possible that some experience problems as drops in the connection, response time slower on the part of the ISP, problems with some websites and things of that style.

All this is that IPv6 is a 128bits Protocol, what makes that the some estimates the number of possible connections of 34 trillion.

As a result of this increase is not necessary the use of NAT systems, because there are enough addresses as all machines to connect each other directly, returning to be a real network between extremes.


Access speed  IPv6 protocol features

Access to the Protocol analysis suggests that the speed of access to the new directions is 80 percent slower than the previous IPv4.

The change represents a great leap of Internet architecture, adds complexity and modifies the way of working of the browsers, the connection of devices and how to operate and access to the services. A comparative analysis carried out by Compuware among URLs of both protocols shows that IPv6 sites are 80% slower than their IPv4 counterparts. All of this puts at risk the experience of the user, and therefore companies and revenues to the brand reputation, as well as causing changes in the way of measuring and monitoring the performance of the application.


Possible attacks

InfoSec Institute researchers have discovered a new way of stealing the traffic on the internal network thanks to the configuration default IPv6 on Windows and MacOS X. It is a kind of man in the Middle, but much easier than the usual techniques in IPv4 (e.g. arp-spoofing). The attack has been called SLAAC, but this is not a 0 day, as they proclaim.
 


Obtain and redirect the traffic on the internal network to a machine controlled by an attacker is a technique known in the world of IPv4. Poison the ARP cache systems, is one of the methods more employees. Now, the SLAAC attack get the a similar effect but "cleaner".


What it consists of

The attacker must introduce a router (or a device to act as such, you can be your own computer) on the internal network with two interfaces (virtual or not): one facing the internal network that supports only IPv6 and another with connection to Internet (IPv4 only). In these moments there will be an additional IPv6 network, but the attacker does not control the traffic. The intruder will begin to send RA (router advertisements, announcements of routes), which is a kind of DHCP for IPv6. The objective is that the traffic pass through the interface IPv6 without that customers notice anything and this is achieved due to a deprecated specification.
 


The method is defined in the router an IPv6 prefix and embed in the last 32 bits an IP address version 4, that according to the planned attack, it must match a DNS server of the attacker himself, located on the IPv4 interface of the router (on the Internet). If you set up properly that router from the attacker to handle translate IPv4 IPv6 addresses of victims (through NAT-PT), consumed the attack, fooling the user that creates that its  DNS server is that of the attacker.
 

In short, the victim uses without realizing it has the DNS of the attacker to resolve addresses and, therefore, it can be redirected to any page (that do not use certificates) transparently.



Windows and the new Protocol  IPv6 protocol features

Microsoft acknowledges that there are "certain incompatibilities" with Windows Vista and IPv6, among the various problems that the ICMP error messages (used, among others, to make the famous "pings") cannot be read by applications under Vista.


And the problems are emerging. For example, print jobs on network become corrupted regularly until that turns off the support IPv6 in Vista, moment in which everything returns to normal.  As a result, some consultants are already recommending to customers that they deactivate in their workstations support for IPv6, at least until the complete networks to migrate to IPv6. They also claim that the networks responsible for should take good note of this matter, because if they don't have it they may lose many hours trying to solve problems.



General features of IPV6

As mentioned, IPv6 was designed as a natural evolution to IPv4. I.e., everything worked beautifully in IPv4 has been, what did not work removed, and has tried to add new features while maintaining compatibility between both protocols. The main features of IPv6 are:
Larger address space.
Optimization of routing multicast and anycast addressing appearance.
Auto-configuration of the nodes.
Intrinsic security at the core of the Protocol.
Quality of service and service classes.
Efficient and extensible packages.
More efficient routing in the backbone.
Renumbering and multihoming, which facilitates the change of service provider.
Characteristics of mobility.


IPv6 has been designed to live (coexist) with IPv4, during a transitional period. It was technically impossible to "improve" IPv4 to solve problems, because this would have involved stop Internet long, enough that posts agreement all Internet service providers and companies that have 'routers' connected to the network, put of agreement to upgrade to this hypothetical update of IPv4.
 


Why the new IPv6 protocol is not compatible with IPv4, and requires a transitional phase. So we will have a phase of coexistence with the previous Protocol. This transitional phase is expected to be 15 or 20 years, but the reality is that now perhaps we will reach a point of mass deployment which might reduce this period to just four or five years. It obviously is something that remains to be seen, will have to wait, but I think it quite likely that is a remnant of trafficking very small IPv4 in this environment. IPv6 protocol features