[governance] Why we need IPv6 and why you should care

[Avri Doria]

On 26 Feb 2008, at 23:45, Ian Peter wrote:

>
> My understanding is that the major deployment of NATs is with  
> corporate
> networks and government networks. Am I right? And isn't the capacity  
> to
> ensure that you cannot make a direct connection from Internet to any  
> one of
> hundreds of thousands of computers in corporate networks fundamental  
> to
> network security as currently practiced? In other words, aren't they  
> going
> to want to have NATs for network security, IPv6 or no IPv6? So won't  
> NATs
> just live on?


NATs really only provide false security.  i.e you may think they are  
hiding the network behind, but they aren't really.  One can still  
often tell what is behind them.  They are not really firewalls, though  
a lot of NATS come packaged with a firewall..


Firewalls will remain.
And I think NATs and application gateways will remain

And the reason I believe that NATs will remain in IPv6 despite the  
huge address space is that we still will not get enough addresses from  
our ISPs or rather we still need to pay extra for multiple addresses  
(no matter what the RFCs or RIRs say about distributing the addresses  
in blocks)  so we will still have NATs.

This, BTW, is not something that is universally agreed upon - 1-2  
years ago 98 in 100 at the IETF would have sworn that there would  
never be an IPv6 NAT. But it is starting to look like NATs will indeed  
persist, even if they are not a security measure.  I think that the  
sooner we learn how to live with them, the better.

a.

Ps. I was one of the 2/100 who never believed NATs would persist when  
we migrated to IPv6.  It will be obvious some day whether I was wrong.
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