this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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I remember doing an IT course over a decade ago and learning about IPv6 taking over, honestly surprised it hasn't yet. I just looked it up and apparently they came up with it in 1998. How is it taking so long? Is there some technical reason it's harder or something? Does the extra address size mean a not so great trade off in traffic or something?
note: I did study a bit of networking and IT but have forgotten everything mostly and work in a different field, thus my ignorance.
In addition to what the other commented said, a lot of sys and net admins really don't like the idea of every lan device being globally addressable, while there's ways around it, a standard ipv4 Nat is a safety blanket to a lot of admins... Not that it should be like that, just my observation.
Those admins don't know what they're talking about. IPv6 has a region of the address space that can only be reached locally - similar to the 192.168.x.x space in IPv4. The only difference is it's really big (way bigger than the entire IPv4 space).
As for NAT... there's nothing stopping you from using it with IPv6. It's often unnecessary, but if you disagree you can use it. And in practice NAT is often part of the transition process to IPv6 - my cell network carrier for example gives my phone an IPv6 address on their internal network but routes all my traffic to the regular internet via IPv4. They are using NAT to do that. If you try to ping my phone's IPv6 address, it won't reach my phone.
Honestly my biggest issue with ipv6, aside from not understanding it, which I don't, at all, I've realized while setting up my own opnsense firewall, is that they decided on FUVKING COLONS. AND LETTERS. Okay, cool, hexadecimal exists, that's swell, but typing them is such a fucking pain in the ass.
There's no way to put your fingers on a keyboard to make it feel natural.
While I agree that it is godawful to type and worse to read, let alone remember, you wouldn’t want these addresses in full decimal notation…
Nothing the mechanical keyboard community can't solve.
https://ipv6buddy.com/
They need to stop that nonsense. NAT is not for security, and was not designed for security purposes. In fact, there are a few ways it subverts security, such as SNI in TLS making the connection less private than it could be.
If they want to block external connections, a border firewall can do the job just fine without NAT. It's arguably better, because NAT complicates existing firewall rules and their implementation in code. Complications are the enemy of security.
How do you anonymize ip addresses without effectively recreating nat using firewall rules?
Mu. Why do you feel the need to anonymize IP addresses?
There is no way to personally identify anyone. Right now advertisers have to jump through hoops of cookies and browser fingerprinting to identify you- which can be blocked.
They still wouldn't. A single computer address is not an individual. They're only slightly better off compared to knowing the edge router IP like they do now.
If you really want to protect against that, then use a proxy or an onion router. NAT was never meant to do this, and it does it poorly.
It is extremely likely to be the same user. Shared computers are rare today.
So what? They still don't have much more information than the edge router IP. Again, if you want to protect yourself here, use a proxy, onion router, or VPN. NAT is not designed to tackle this, and does it poorly.
In a large cooperate network, or even a small network, there's nothing fixing a device to a specific network address. You can shuffle those around between people entering and leaving the building and device power cycles just like DHCP does for IPv4.