Introduction 

In our most recent blog series, Exploring the Advisory Committees, we took a deep dive into one of the many benefits of taking part in the IJIS community; being an active participant on the IJIS Advisory Committees. The advantages of being a member on these cross-sector, collaborative committees were highlighted through the exploration of committee membership, their achievements, and goals for the future. All while promoting the IJIS mission of driving public sector technology innovation and empowering information sharing to promote safer and healthier communities. 

As depicted in the IJIS Technology and Architecture’s Advisory Committee’s (ITAC) portion of the series, the ITAC provides information and guidance to industry and practitioners regarding technologies, architectures, and standards that enable the successful adoption of technology and sharing of information. Over the next several months, the ITAC and its committee members will be releasing a series of short research “spotlight” blogs on a variety of different technologies related to the committee’s objectives. The committee will be focusing on topics that are innovative, emerging, underpublicized and not universally understood within the public sector community. 

While this blog concentrates on IPv6: Use Cases, Limitations and its Future, we would love to hear your feedback on other technologies of curiosity moving forward. For any questions, comments, or inquiries about joining the ITAC, contact: alex.mcadoo@ijis.org. 

Overview 

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) was published in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) publication RFC 791 in September 1981 (ICANNWiki, 2016). IPv4 defines the IP addresses in a 32-bit format which limits the total number of unique IP addresses, or physical devices, to a little over 4.2 billion. IPv4 became the foundations of the current “Internet”. 

Given the explosive growth of the Internet and address limitations of IPv4, the IETF began studying the impact of the growth of the Internet with respect to the limitations of IPv4 (ARIN, 2021). This resulted in the core definition of IPv6 in December of 1998 (ARIN, 2021). 

This brief is intended to provide a high-level overview of IPv6, its use cases, limitations, and future outlook. 

What is IPv6? 

In December of 1998, IETF issued publication RFC 2460 which presented an initial specification of IPv6. This publication was replaced in July, 2017 by RFC 8200. IPv6 presents major enhancements to IPv4 some of which are (Network Computing Editors, 2011) (Deering & Hinden, 2017): 

•          Expanded Addressing: IPv6 increases the IP address size from 32 bits to 128 bits. The number of IPv6 addresses is 1028 times larger than the number IPv4 addresses.
•          More Efficient Routing: IPv6 introduces more levels of address hierarchy.
•          Header Format Simplification: Some IPv4 header fields dropped or made optional.
•          Network Address Auto-configuration: IPv6 provides builtin address autoconfiguration.
•          Elimination of Network Address Translation (NAT): Private address space is eliminated. The large address space, combined with multiple levels of address allocations pretty much eliminates the need of NATs.
•          Enhanced Security: Builtin support for confidentiality, authentication and data integrity via IPSec. Indeed, IPSec is actually a mandatory part of the core protocol. Additionally, IPv6 provides header extensions that provides for easy implementations of encryption, authentication and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
•          Quality of Service: True quality of service via “flow labeling”.

IPv6 is designed to be more robust and secure. IPv6 builds on the lessons-learned over the years in the expansion and operations of IPv4. Indeed, the design of IPv4 did not anticipate the address space driven by the proliferation of devices. It also did not take into account the needs for additional security, better prioritization of certain kind of traffic (e.g., real-time services, etc.) and simpler configuration (Amirth, 2021). 

Uses and Relevance 

IPv6 is on its way to fully replacing IPv4 albeit slower than anticipated. A number of Internet companies and Telcom providers are using IPv6 – of course some more than others. A recent memo issued by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directs all Federal agencies to deploy IPv6 by 2025 (Vought, 2020). 

From a device addressing perspective, IPv6 provides a new dimension – that of ensuring that every device has its own unique global IP address. The 128-bit address space of IPv6 provides nearly 600 quadrillion addresses for every square millimeter on Earth (Amirth, 2021). Some of the benefits of each device having a unique global IP address include: 

•          Advanced peer-to-peer communications are much easier to implement.
•          Two-way applications such as IP telephony, video conferencing and gaming will be much simpler to develop and deploy.
•          Autoconfiguration becomes a simpler process as the unique global IP address includes the device’s physical address (e.g., the 48-bit ethernet address, etc.), often encoded in hardware. IPv6 includes a feature called “Stateless Autoconfiguration” whereby the hosts generate the lower 64 bits of the IP address, often using the 48-bit physical address, and combine it with a 64-bit route/network address in order to form a complete IP address.

The enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) enables IPv6 routers to identify certain types of network traffic and give each type of network traffic a specific amount of the available bandwidth. This means that certain critical traffic and/or real-time traffic will command a higher priority than other traffic. 

Limitations and Challenges 

While IPv6, and IPv6 devices, has been around for a number of years, adoption continues to be slow and debates around the value of IPv6 continues. It is well understood that a complete replacement of IPv4 by IPv6 will take quite some time. To ease that burden, IPv6 includes several features to permit coexistence (Das, n.d.). Additionally, certain Internet common services, such as the Domain Name Service (DNS), are starting to provide IPv6, returning IPv6 addresses in response to a DNS query when requested. 

Software developers are just starting to assess IPv6. Most applications do not yet provide direct support of IPv6 as there has not been much demand. However, the IETF has provided guidance to applications developers in RFC 4038 to include the considerations in developing applications that can support both IPv4 and IPv6 (Hogg, 2011).  The lack of IPv6 aware applications is perhaps the single greatest impediment to the adoption of IPv6. 

Additionally, systems, software, information security and network designer & engineers with in-depth knowledge of IPv6 are scarce as IPv6 is just starting to be included in training and educational curriculums. Most engineers are attempting to apply their knowledge of IPv4 in understanding and working with IPv6. 

IPv6 mandates and simplifies a number of network security techniques but often requires knowledge and expertise in order to configure these techniques properly. For example, IPSec Authentication Headers can be used to prove the authenticity of an IPv6 address, but IPSec support must be explicitly enabled (Grimmick, 2021). 

Conclusion 

IPv6 represents the future of the Internet and telecommunications. While adoption has been much slower than originally predicted, it is increasing. To that end, we recommend: 

•          Public sector organizations review and assess their plans for adoption of IPv6. If they have not created such plans, they should begin this effort.
•          In procurement of Information Technology (IT) applications and systems, organizations should be asking their vendors for compliance with IPv6. If their vendors are not compliant, they should be asking for a roadmap for compliance.
•          In procurement of networking hardware and software, organizations should be requiring IPv6 compliance. All networking hardware and software need to support dual IP stacks and be able handle both kinds of IP traffic.
•          Public sector organizations should be developing and implementing plans for IPv6 awareness along with IPv6 training for their IT shops.
•          Public sector CIOs should be developing transition plans to IPv6. Given that the Federal government has issued a directive to transition to IPv6 by 2025, this is especially true for those organizations and programs that interact with Federal agencies.