IPv6 Diffusion Milestones: Assessing the Quantity and Quality of Adoption

There are currently two versions of Internet Protocol (IP) in use today, IP version 4 (IPv4) and IP version 6 (IPv6). The original version, IPv4, was standardized in the early 1980s as part of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency Internet program and became the official Internet protocol in 1983 (Kleinrock, 2010). IPv6 was standardized in 1995 as its successor to provide enhanced capabilities and address IPv4 technological limitations, most notable of which was the anticipated exhaustion of address space (Deering & Hinden, 1995). While the two protocols have some functional similarities, they are distinct and not backward compatible; IPv4-only devices cannot communicate directly with IPv6-only devices and vice-versa. Consequently, organizations wishing to take full advantage of the enhanced features of IPv6 must upgrade their entire network infrastructure and end devices to support IPv6, while at the same time maintaining IPv4 support for legacy systems that will not or cannot be upgraded. The costs and risks associated with upgrading an entire network to support a new protocol with no intrinsic return on investment has acted as a disincentive for IPv6 adoption. To be sure, the transition of the Internet to IPv6 has certainly taken a leisurely pace over the past twenty years. Given the slow pace of adoption, it is understandable that many doubted, and may still doubt that IPv6 will ever become the dominant Internet protocol and replace IPv4. However, in line with diffusion of innovations theory, it is the case with many innovations that potential adopters do not perceive any relative advantage, thus leading to a particularly slow adoption take-up rate. This is especially true with communications technologies that have high interdependence and require a critical mass of users before adoption becomes self-sustaining and rapidly accelerates (Rogers 2003). The goal of this paper is to provide empirical evidence showing that IPv6 adoption has reached critical mass and is now in a phase of accelerating adoption projected to continue. A methodology for monitoring the quality of IPv6 enablement and global IPv6 support is also provided so that the user experience over IPv6 can be assessed against the IPv4 baseline

A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment

As ISPs face IPv4 address scarcity they increasingly turn to network address translation (NAT) to accommodate the address needs of their customers. Recently, ISPs have moved beyond employing NATs only directly at individual customers and instead begun deploying Carrier-Grade NATs (CGNs) to apply address translation to many independent and disparate endpoints spanning physical locations, a phenomenon that so far has received little in the way of empirical assessment. In this work we present a broad and systematic study of the deployment and behavior of these middleboxes. We develop a methodology to detect the existence of hosts behind CGNs by extracting non-routable IP addresses from peer lists we obtain by crawling the BitTorrent DHT. We complement this approach with improvements to our Netalyzr troubleshooting service, enabling us to determine a range of indicators of CGN presence as well as detailed insights into key properties of CGNs. Combining the two data sources we illustrate the scope of CGN deployment on today's Internet, and report on characteristics of commonly deployed CGNs and their effect on end users

Internet Localization of Multi-Party Relay Users: Inherent Friction Between Internet Services and User Privacy

Internet privacy is increasingly important on the modern Internet. Users are looking to control the trail of data that they leave behind on the systems that they interact with. Multi-Party Relay (MPR) architectures lower the traditional barriers to adoption of privacy enhancing technologies on the Internet. MPRs are unique from legacy architectures in that they are able to offer privacy guarantees without paying significant performance penalties. Apple's iCloud Private Relay is a recently deployed MPR service, creating the potential for widespread consumer adoption of the architecture. However, many current Internet-scale systems are designed based on assumptions that may no longer hold for users of privacy enhancing systems like Private Relay. There are inherent tensions between systems that rely on data about users -- estimated location of a user based on their IP address, for example -- and the trend towards a more private Internet. This work studies a core function that is widely used to control network and application behavior, IP geolocation, in the context of iCloud Private Relay usage. We study the location accuracy of popular IP geolocation services compared against the published location dataset that Apple publicly releases to explicitly aid in geolocating PR users. We characterize geolocation service performance across a number of dimensions, including different countries, IP version, infrastructure provider, and time. Our findings lead us to conclude that existing approaches to IP geolocation (e.g., frequently updated databases) perform inadequately for users of the MPR architecture. For example, we find median location errors >1,000 miles in some countries for IPv4 addresses using IP2Location. Our findings lead us to conclude that new, privacy-focused, techniques for inferring user location may be required as privacy becomes a default user expectation on the Internet

Evolutionary gaming approach for decision making of Tier-3 Internet service provider networks migration to SoDIP6 networks

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Dawadi, BR, Rawat, DB, Joshi, SR, Manzoni, P. Evolutionary gaming approach for decision making of Tier-3 Internet service provider networks migration to SoDIP6 networks. Int J Commun Syst. 2020; 33:e4399, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.4399. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.[EN] With the increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, current networking world is suffering in terms of management and operations with lack of IPv4 addresses leading to issues like network address translation (NAT) proliferation, security and quality of services. Software-defined networking (SDN) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) are the new networking paradigms evolved to address related issues of legacy IPv4 networking. To adapt with global competitive environment and avoid all existing issues in legacy networking system, network service providers have to migrate their networks into IPv6 and SDN-enabled networks. But immediate transformations of existing network are not viable due to several factors like higher cost of migration, lack of technical human resources, lack of standards and protocols during transitions, and many more. In this paper, we present the migration analysis for proper decision making of network transition in terms of customer demand, traffic engineering, and organizational strength with operation expenditure for network migration using evolutionary gaming approach. Joint migration to SDN-enabled IPv6 network from game theoretic perspective is modeled and is validated using numerical results obtained from simulations. Our empirical analysis shows the evolutionary process of network migration while different internal and external factors in the organization affect the overall migration. Evolutionary game in migration planning is supportive in decision making for service providers to develop suitable strategy for their network migration. The proposed approach for migration decision making is mostly applicable to fairly sustained service providers who lack economics, regulation/policy, and resources strengths.ERASMUS+, Grant/Award Number: KA107; UGC-NP, Grant/Award Number: FRG-074/75-Engg-01; NTNU-EnPE-MSESSD; US National Science Foundation, Grant/Award Numbers: CNS 1650831, HRD 1828811; NASTDawadi, BR.; Rawat, DB.; Joshi, SR.; Manzoni, P. (2020). Evolutionary gaming approach for decision making of Tier-3 Internet service provider networks migration to SoDIP6 networks. 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IEEE Communications Magazine, 51(7), 36-43. doi:10.1109/mcom.2013.6553676ONF TR‐506.SDN migration considerations and use cases.;2014.https://www.opennetworking.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sb-sdn-migration-use-cases.pdf.Raza, M. H., Sivakumar, S. C., Nafarieh, A., & Robertson, B. (2014). A Comparison of Software Defined Network (SDN) Implementation Strategies. Procedia Computer Science, 32, 1050-1055. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2014.05.532Wu, P., Cui, Y., Wu, J., Liu, J., & Metz, C. (2013). Transition from IPv4 to IPv6: A State-of-the-Art Survey. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 15(3), 1407-1424. doi:10.1109/surv.2012.110112.00200Contreras, L. M., Doolan, P., Lønsethagen, H., & López, D. R. (2015). Operational, organizational and business challenges for network operators in the context of SDN and NFV. Computer Networks, 92, 211-217. doi:10.1016/j.comnet.2015.07.016Sandhya, Sinha, Y., & Haribabu, K. (2017). A survey: Hybrid SDN. 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Four years tracking unrevealed topological changes in the african interdomain

Despite extensive studies on the Internet topology, little is still known about the AS level topology of the African Internet, especially when it comes to its IXP substrate. The main reason for this is the lack of vantage points that are needed to obtain the proper information. From 2013 to 2016, we enhanced the RIPE Atlas measurement infrastructure in the region to shed light on both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies interconnecting local ISPs. We increased the number of vantage points in Africa by 278.3% and carried out measurements between them at random periods. To infer results that depict the behavior of ISPs in the region, we propose reproducible traceroute data analysis techniques suitable for the treatment of any set of similar measurements. We first reveal a large variety of ISP transit habits and their dependence on socio-economic factors. We then compare QoS within African countries, European countries, and the US to find that West African networks in particular need to promote investments in fiber networks and to implement traffic engineering techniques. Our results indicate the remaining dominance of ISPs based outside Africa for the provision of intra-continental paths, but also shed light on traffic localization efforts. We map, in our traceroute data, 62.2% of the IXPs in Africa and infer their respective peers. Finally, we highlight the launch of new IXPs and quantify their impacts on end-to-end connectivity. The study clearly demonstrates that to better assess interdomain routing in a continent, it is necessary to perform measurements from a diversified range of vantage points.The work done by Rodérick Fanou was funded by IMDEA Networks Institute as part of the project “Mapping and Measuring the African Internet”. Francisco Valera has been partially funded by the European Commission under FP7 project LEONE (FP7-317647).Publicad

State of Internet Measurement in Africa - A Survey

This paper presents the results of a survey aimed at understanding the status of Internet measurement platforms usage, deployment and capabilities in Africa. It presents findings related to prevalence of measurement in the region, the reasons why the different business categories investigated conduct Internet measurement as well as the metrics of interest to these entities. The survey also looked at the popular measurement platforms that the respondents use in their measurement activities as well as the platforms that are hosted by businesses and users in the African region. The survey also recorded responses related to data handling and privacy considerations. A total of 123 responses were received from 34 countries. The survey revealed that Internet measurements are not widely conducted in the region largely due to the inadequacy of deployed measurement platforms, the lack of awareness in the subject, and the lack of relevant skills to carry out the measurement tasks. We outlined some recommendations to remedy these issues

A Brave New World: Studies on the Deployment and Security of the Emerging IPv6 Internet.

Recent IPv4 address exhaustion events are ushering in a new era of rapid transition to the next generation Internet protocol---IPv6. Via Internet-scale experiments and data analysis, this dissertation characterizes the adoption and security of the emerging IPv6 network. The work includes three studies, each the largest of its kind, examining various facets of the new network protocol's deployment, routing maturity, and security. The first study provides an analysis of ten years of IPv6 deployment data, including quantifying twelve metrics across ten global-scale datasets, and affording a holistic understanding of the state and recent progress of the IPv6 transition. Based on cross-dataset analysis of relative global adoption rates and across features of the protocol, we find evidence of a marked shift in the pace and nature of adoption in recent years and observe that higher-level metrics of adoption lag lower-level metrics. Next, a network telescope study covering the IPv6 address space of the majority of allocated networks provides insight into the early state of IPv6 routing. Our analyses suggest that routing of average IPv6 prefixes is less stable than that of IPv4. This instability is responsible for the majority of the captured misdirected IPv6 traffic. Observed dark (unallocated destination) IPv6 traffic shows substantial differences from the unwanted traffic seen in IPv4---in both character and scale. Finally, a third study examines the state of IPv6 network security policy. We tested a sample of 25 thousand routers and 520 thousand servers against sets of TCP and UDP ports commonly targeted by attackers. We found systemic discrepancies between intended security policy---as codified in IPv4---and deployed IPv6 policy. Such lapses in ensuring that the IPv6 network is properly managed and secured are leaving thousands of important devices more vulnerable to attack than before IPv6 was enabled. Taken together, findings from our three studies suggest that IPv6 has reached a level and pace of adoption, and shows patterns of use, that indicates serious production employment of the protocol on a broad scale. However, weaker IPv6 routing and security are evident, and these are leaving early dual-stack networks less robust than the IPv4 networks they augment.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120689/1/jczyz_1.pd