April 2010 Archives

For an advanced technology that we all depend upon, it sure seems that the Internet has more than its fair share of problems: spam, viruses, malware, spyware, phishing, worms, trojans, DDoS attacks, hijacks, DNS cache poisoning, botnets, keystroke loggers, etc. We need an entirely new vocabulary just to talk about this stuff. Most of it appears to come out of the blue, forcing the rest of the world to react. But the good news is that there is at least one problem we can do something about in advance. Unfortunately, not everyone has been taking the problem seriously enough and we are about to hit the wall.

I'm talking about the impending exhaustion of IP addresses, IPv4 addresses to be exact. Every computer on the Internet needs access to at least one unique address in order to be connected. Around the dawn of the Internet, 32-bit IPv4 addresses, which allow for 4,294,967,296 different possibilities, seemed like more than enough. This was a simpler time when computers cost millions and no one imagined a phone you could put in your pocket. As the Internet grew, it soon became obvious that the seemingly inexhaustible supply of 4 billion addresses wasn't quite enough. And so, a 128-bit IPv6-based Internet was proposed, this one with 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 different addresses. (We're not going to make that mistake again!) The only problem was that the new Internet wasn't interoperable with the old one we already knew and loved. Without a Y2K-type hard deadline to focus on, we kept barreling along toward the edge of the IPv4 cliff. Now that the edge is clearly in sight, this blog looks at how far we have come in adopting the not-so-new-anymore IPv6 Internet and, perhaps more importantly, how much further we need to go.

The Internet infrastructure has been having a bad month. Not as bad as, say, the world's aviation infrastructure, but bad enough.

First, Chinese Internet censorship leaked out to a few massively unlucky users of the I root server. Then China Telecom failed to filter someone who leaked thousands of hijacked routes to other people's networks through them, probably by accident.

And then, inexplicably, Forbes went where no one had gone before (with a wink to Wired), and asked whether China might actually be testing a "cybernuke".

At first, this irritated me. Journalists and bloggers and blogger-journalists are fanning the flames of US unease about the growing role of China in world affairs. But then I realized that I could probably make tens of thousands of people read my blog, too, by jumping on the bandwagon. By all means, then, grab an MRE and hunker down in your Internet bomb shelter while I try to answer some of the obvious questions that came our way in the wake of the Forbes article:

• How would anyone build a cybernuke? What is that?
• Could a single actor, state-sponsored or otherwise, actually take down the global or regional Internet infrastructure of 2010, disrupt financial markets, throw civilization into chaos?
• How do I get my cybernuke movie screenplay optioned by Jerry Bruckheimer? His people won't return my calls.