Development of a Graduate Course on the Transition to Internet Protocol Version 6

Internet and mobile connectivity has grown tremendously in the last few decades, creating an ever increasing demand for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The pool of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, once assumed to be more than sufficient for every person on this planet, has reached its final stages of depletion. With The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority’s (IANA) global pools depleted, and four of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR) pools down to the their last /8 block, the remaining addresses will not last very long. In order to ensure continuous growth of the internet in the foreseeable future, we would need a newer internet protocol, with a much larger address space. Specifically, with that goal in mind the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was designed about two decades ago. Over the years it has matured, and has proven that it could eventually replace the existing IPv4. This thesis presents the development a graduate level course on the transition to IPv6. The course makes an attempt at understanding how the new IPv6 protocol is different than the currently used IPv4 protocol. And also tries to emphasize on the options existing to facilitate a smooth transition of production networks from IPv4 to IPv6

Traversing NAT: A Problem

This quasi-experimental before-and-after study measured and analyzed the impacts of adding security to a new bi-directional Network Address Translation (NAT). Literature revolves around various types of NAT, their advantages and disadvantages, their security models, and networking technologies’ adoption. The study of the newly created secure bi-directional model of NAT showed statistically significant changes in the variables than another model using port forwarding. Future research of how data will traverse networks is crucial in an ever-changing world of technology

IP and ATM integration: A New paradigm in multi-service internetworking

ATM is a widespread technology adopted by many to support advanced data communication, in particular efficient Internet services provision. The expected challenges of multimedia communication together with the increasing massive utilization of IP-based applications urgently require redesign of networking solutions in terms of both new functionalities and enhanced performance. However, the networking context is affected by so many changes, and to some extent chaotic growth, that any approach based on a structured and complex top-down architecture is unlikely to be applicable. Instead, an approach based on finding out the best match between realistic service requirements and the pragmatic, intelligent use of technical opportunities made available by the product market seems more appropriate. By following this approach, innovations and improvements can be introduced at different times, not necessarily complying with each other according to a coherent overall design. With the aim of pursuing feasible innovations in the different networking aspects, we look at both IP and ATM internetworking in order to investigating a few of the most crucial topics/ issues related to the IP and ATM integration perspective. This research would also address various means of internetworking the Internet Protocol (IP) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) with an objective of identifying the best possible means of delivering Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for multi-service applications, exploiting the meritorious features that IP and ATM have to offer. Although IP and ATM often have been viewed as competitors, their complementary strengths and limitations from a natural alliance that combines the best aspects of both the technologies. For instance, one limitation of ATM networks has been the relatively large gap between the speed of the network paths and the control operations needed to configure those data paths to meet changing user needs. IP\u27s greatest strength, on the other hand, is the inherent flexibility and its capacity to adapt rapidly to changing conditions. These complementary strengths and limitations make it natural to combine IP with ATM to obtain the best that each has to offer. Over time many models and architectures have evolved for IP/ATM internetworking and they have impacted the fundamental thinking in internetworking IP and ATM. These technologies, architectures, models and implementations will be reviewed in greater detail in addressing possible issues in integrating these architectures s in a multi-service, enterprise network. The objective being to make recommendations as to the best means of interworking the two in exploiting the salient features of one another to provide a faster, reliable, scalable, robust, QoS aware network in the most economical manner. How IP will be carried over ATM when a commercial worldwide ATM network is deployed is not addressed and the details of such a network still remain in a state of flux to specify anything concrete. Our research findings culminated with a strong recommendation that the best model to adopt, in light of the impending integrated service requirements of future multi-service environments, is an ATM core with IP at the edges to realize the best of both technologies in delivering QoS guarantees in a seamless manner to any node in the enterprise

IPv6: a new security challenge

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2011O Protocolo de Internet versão 6 (IPv6) foi desenvolvido com o intuito de resolver alguns dos problemas não endereçados pelo seu antecessor, o Protocolo de Internet versão 4 (IPv4), nomeadamente questões relacionadas com segurança e com o espaço de endereçamento disponível. São muitos os que na última década têm desenvolvido estudos sobre os investimentos necessários à sua adoção e sobre qual o momento certo para que o mesmo seja adotado por todos os players no mercado. Recentemente, o problema da extinção de endereçamentos públicos a ser disponibilizado pelas diversas Region Internet registry – RIRs - despertou o conjunto de entidades envolvidas para que se agilizasse o processo de migração do IPv4 para o IPv6. Ao contrário do IPv4, esta nova versão considera a segurança como um objetivo fundamental na sua implementação, nesse sentido é recomendado o uso do protocolo IPsec ao nível da camada de rede. No entanto, e devido à imaturidade do protocolo e à complexidade que este período de transição comporta, existem inúmeras implicações de segurança que devem ser consideradas neste período de migração. O objetivo principal deste trabalho é definir um conjunto de boas práticas no âmbito da segurança na implementação do IPv6 que possa ser utilizado pelos administradores de redes de dados e pelas equipas de segurança dos diversos players no mercado. Nesta fase de transição, é de todo útil e conveniente contribuir de forma eficiente na interpretação dos pontos fortes deste novo protocolo assim como nas vulnerabilidades a ele associadas.IPv6 was developed to address the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, but has not yet seen global deployment. Recent trends are now finally changing this picture and IPv6 is expected to take off soon. Contrary to the original, this new version of the Internet Protocol has security as a design goal, for example with its mandatory support for network layer security. However, due to the immaturity of the protocol and the complexity of the transition period, there are several security implications that have to be considered when deploying IPv6. In this project, our goal is to define a set of best practices for IPv6 Security that could be used by IT staff and network administrators within an Internet Service Provider. To this end, an assessment of some of the available security techniques for IPv6 will be made by means of a set of laboratory experiments using real equipment from an Internet Service Provider in Portugal. As the transition for IPv6 seems inevitable this work can help ISPs in understanding the threats that exist in IPv6 networks and some of the prophylactic measures available, by offering recommendations to protect internal as well as customers’ networks

Multihoming with ILNP in FreeBSD

Multihoming allows nodes to be multiply connected to the network. It forms the basis of features which can improve network responsiveness and robustness; e.g. load balancing and fail-over, which can be considered as a choice between network locations. However, IP today assumes that IP addresses specify both network location and node identity. Therefore, these features must be implemented at routers. This dissertation considers an alternative based on the multihoming approach of the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP). ILNP is one of many proposals for a split between network location and node identity. However, unlike other proposals, ILNP removes the use of IP addresses as they are used today. To date, ILNP has not been implemented within an operating system stack. I produce the first implementation of ILNP in FreeBSD, based on a superset of IPv6 – ILNPv6 – and demonstrate a key feature of ILNP: multihoming as a first class function of the operating system, rather than being implemented as a routing function as it is today. To evaluate the multihoming capability, I demonstrate one important application of multihoming – load distribution – at three levels of network hierarchy including individual hosts, a singleton Site Border Router (SBR), and a novel, dynamically instantiated, distributed SBR (dSBR). For each level, I present empirical results from a hardware testbed; metrics include latency, throughput, loss and reordering. I compare performance with unmodified IPv6 and NPTv6. Finally, I evaluate the feasibility of dSBR-ILNPv6 as an alternative to existing multihoming approaches, based on measurements of the dSBR’s responsiveness to changes in site connectivity. We find that multihoming can be implemented by individual hosts and/or SBRs, without requiring additional routing state as is the case today, and without any significant additional load or overhead compared to unicast IPv6

A New Addressing and Forwarding Architecture for the Internet

The current Internet routing and addressing architecture is facing a serious scalability problem. The default free zone (DFZ) routing table size grows at an increasing and potentially alarming rate. The Internet architecture uses a single namespace - the IP address, to express two functions about a network entity: its identifier and locator. This overloading of semantics leads to the scalability problem as a consequence of multihoming, traffic engineering, and nonaggregatable address allocations. The current Internet architecture does not inherently support emerging features such as mobility either. This thesis presents a simple addressing and forwarding architecture (SAFA) for the Internet. SAFA separates the locator namespace from the ID namespace so that the locators can follow the hierarchies in the Internet topology and be aggregated. The locators are allocated dynamically and automatically. The hierarchical format of locators gives end systems more control over the route selection. A straightforward forwarding scheme is designed based on the hierarchical addressing scheme. The meshed part of the Internet topology is integrated into the forwarding procedure through a special forwarding table. With a rendezvous service that maps from IDs to locators, SAFA also provides scalable support for mobility, multihoming and traffic engineering. Our work also includes an Internet topology study and a prototype implementation of the architecture. The evaluation results suggest that SAFA would be feasible in the current Internet if deployed

Handling of IP-Addresses in the Context of Remote Access

Masteroppgave i informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi 2008 – Universitetet i Agder, GrimstadFor various reasons (e.g., security, lack of IPv4-addresses) the services in the home smart space only use private IP addresses. This is unfortunate in the remote service access since these addresses frequently appear in responses sent from a service in the remote smart space (e.g., your home) to the visited smart space (e.g., your friend’s home).The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) provides some solutions and workarounds for the problem caused by NAT. In this project, the challenge to me is to summarize the available options, rank the options according to which one is preferred for the RA-scenario. I will come up with my practical NAT traversal techniques by testing and gathering data on the reliability of NAT traversal techniques since none of the existing ones seems to work well. A demonstration of the key features will be shown in the thesis. NAT traversal techniques apply to TCP and UDP need to be researched in advance. Handling of peers behind all kinds of NAT need to be tested and determined for the communication. The result of the paper will well improve the evaluation of specific issues on NAT and the creating of an UNSAF proposal

A Study of Locator ID Separation Protocol

Thesis advisor: Dr. Deep MedhiTitle from PDF of title page, viewed on November 9, 2010.Includes bibliographic references (pages 74-75).Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2010.Vita.Locator ID/Separation Protocol (LISP) aims at solving the issues in the current Internet Routing Architecture. The growth of the BGP routing table and Forwarding Information bases on core routers is very high. In addition, the number of BGP messages that are currently being processed by the BGP routers is a worrisome issue. Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) is a recently proposed approach that provides a solution to these problems. By employing LISP, it is anticipated that significant scaling benefits can be achieved among which are the reduction of routing table sizes, traffic engineering capabilities, mobility without address changing. We present an analysis of how much these improvements are. Furthermore, a detailed study of this protocol is carried out and is compared against other solutions that are proposed along with an analysis of LISP as well.Abstract -- Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Glossary -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Assumptions in Routing Architecture -- Locator ID/Separation Protocol -- Overview and Tunneling Details -- Messages -- Interworking LISP with IPv4 and IPv6 -- NERD -- LISP and Mobility -- Impact on Routing Table and Edge Network Routers -- Competitive Comparison of LISP -- Advantages and Disadvantages of LISP -- Conclusion -- References -- Vita