[AfrICANN-discuss] Vint Cerf warns on IPv6 uptake

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

http://www.techworld.com/news/index.cfm?NewsID=105980

www.techworld.com : the UK's infrastructure & network knowledge centre
  This page should print automatically. If not select Print from the Filemenu.
 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
The UK's infrastructure & network knowledge centre
(c) 2008 : All rights reserved

-- 
Anne-Rachel Inne
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/africann/attachments/20081023/554517bf/attachment.htm