IPv6 Extension Headers Revisited

The topic of the robustness of IPv6 Extension Headers has experienced a resurgence of interest in recent months. I’d like to update our earlier report on this topic with some more recent measurement data. These extensions to the basic IPv6 packet header have their antecedents in the IPv4 option fields.…


Are we there yet?

The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the…


Hop by Hop

It is a rare situation when you can create an outcome from two somewhat broken technologies where the outcome is not also broken. Unless each of the components can precisely complement each other such that a weakness in one can be covered by a strength in the other, then the…


Another Year of the Transition to IPv6

I bet that nobody believed in 1992 that thirty years later we’d still be discussing the state of the transition to IPv6! In 1992 we were discussing what to do about the forthcoming address crunch in IPv4 and having come to terms with the inevitable prospect that the silicon industry…


Some Notes from RIPE 83

The RIPE community held a meeting in November. Like most community meetings in these Covid-blighted times it was a virtual meeting. Here’s my notes from a few presentations that piqued my interest. All the material presented at the meeting can be found at https://ripe83.ripe.net/. Vulnerability Disclosure Responsible Disclosure is a…


IPv6 Fragmentation Loss

Committees should never attempt to define technology There always seems to be a point in the process where there is a choice between two quite different options, and there is no convincing case that one choice is outstandingly better than the other. Committees find it terribly hard to decide at…


An IPv6 Update for 2020

The Australian Domain Name Administration, AUDA, has recently published its quarterly report for the last quarter of 2020. The report contained the interesting snippet: “The rapid digitisation of our lives and economy – necessitated by COVID-19 – continued to underpin strong growth in .au registrations. New .au domains created in…


IPv6 and the DNS

These days it seems that whenever we start to talk about the DNS the conversation immediately swings around to the subject of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and the various implications of this technology in terms of changes in the way the DNS is used. It’s true that DoH is a…


Measuring IPv6

It’s now the season of virtual workshops, and without the overhead of time spent travelling to these events it’s been possible to participate in a number of these events all over the Internet in the space of a few days. This week I participated in a workshop on measurement of…


Addressing 2019

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…