A Contribution to the January Newsletter – IPv6 and Security Trends
February 1, 2013
RIPE-NCC (the Regional Internet Registry for Europe and the Middle East) exhausted its stock of IPv4 addresses in 2012, thus becoming the second RIR to reach the final stages of free IPv4 pool management. APNIC (the RIR for the Asia/Pacific region) had already exhausted its free pool back in 2011.
Current estimates indicate that ARIN and LACNIC will exhaust their IPv4 stocks in mid-2014. As the estimated exhaustion dates draw near, interest in IPv6 deployment grows – an effect that is evident in LACNIC’s assignment rate (during the first days of 2013, LACNIC reached 1500 IPv6 assignments) as well as in the IPv6 traffic measurements performed by various stakeholders.
In particular, IPv6 traffic measured by Google on its own services surpassed 1% of its total traffic for the first time. This might not seem much, yet it represents a yearly increase of more than 100%[1], a fact that clearly shows that IPv6 deployment for end users is becoming a reality.
In any case, it is likely that during 2013 we will witness the deployment of transition technologies in parallel with CGN (Carrier-Grade NAT) installations, most likely in those regions where IPv4 exhaustion is becoming a hard fact of life.
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One of the highlights of 2012 was World IPv6 Launch Day. On 6 June 2012, some of the largest Internet content providers, among them Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, permanently enabled IPv6 on their public services.[2] The effect has been dramatic: more than 30% of dual-stack network traffic is now using IPv6.
This creates an economic incentive for deploying IP6. CGN equipment is expensive and introduces single points of failure within the operators’ networks, which is why any traffic that that can be sent natively over IPv6 represents a monetary saving for operators.
As to security, several emergent topics can be identified for 2013.