IPv6 Adoption Will Grow With Smart Grid Adoption, Hopes Cisco 169
darthcamaro writes "A lot of people in the US have not seen a use case for the use of IPv6 yet, since we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses. But what happens when the entire electrical grid gets smart? The so-called Smart Grid will need a networking transport mechanism that will connect potentially hundreds of millions of people and devices. Networking giant Cisco sees IP (internet protocol) as the right transport and IPv6 as the logical choice for addressing. 'Pv6 is an interesting discussion and one that occupies a lot of bandwidth at Cisco,' Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing said. 'Some people say that for smaller deployments, we could get away with IPv4, but the smart grid has a number of parts. The point is that if you're looking to build this [smart grid] out, why not build it out on the scalable protocol from the get-go?'"
Re:wait - what IS a smart grid? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid [wikipedia.org]
Re:Translation (Score:3, Informative)
throw out routers? haven't ciscos been ipv6-capable for at least a decade now?
ipv6 is really old stuff. all routers that are 'worth anything' should be v6 capable already. those that aren't probably don't NEED to be, anyway.
not everything needs a world-wide public address. NAT 'security' is actually a Good Thing(tm).
Re:I know my utility meters can be read remotely. (Score:1, Informative)
Its ipv4 on a private network. They can use 4billion in addresses if they want.
There is nothing that says you can not tunnel ipv4 over ipv4 and still have a private network as big as the real internet. This is exactly what all the different guys going after this are doing.
Also think about it. Do you realllllllllllllllllllly want your power grid to be tied to the real internet? IPV6 is a waste of time in the 'utility' market. Never mind the existing protocols that would all have to be chucked out or be routed over ip to get them to work. Not going to happen. These dudes move at glacial pace and for good reason. With say facebook going down there are a bunch of people who can not chat to their 'friends'. But say a sub station goes down. There is thousands of volts and amps jumping around, people with out power/heat, possible death.
They use modbus or a simple ascii protocol usually hooked to a remote wireless device to check your stuff. It is not exactly rocket science.
The real market will be porn somehow. It always is.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:4, Informative)
Except, of course, that isn't really true. I've had to try and run a VPN endpoint on a NAT'd host because our ISP wasn't giving us what they'd advertised. That wasn't fun and if more people are going to want to run VPNs in the future, we're going to need more IP addresses.
The smart grid doesn't need public IPs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Get a Clue! (Score:5, Informative)
Only your first point has anything to do with IPv6. Switching to a new protocol isn't going to make your machine any less "emasculated", and P2P is being suppressed over bandwidth costs (though I'm not even sure how much that's true - I use bittorrent all the time). People who aren't running some kind of web service aren't going to see any benefit from IPv6.
Re:when the entire electrical grid gets smart? (Score:2, Informative)
IPv6 only allows about 3.4 * 10^38 addresses.
Not nearly enough!
Re:Translation (Score:3, Informative)
There is practically *no* security provided by a NAT.
Unless your ISP is compromised
Your ISP doesn't have to be compromised. Many cable systems are set up so that the cable segment is basically a bus and the cable modems are bridges. Anyone on that segment can adjust their routing appropriately.
Also, even if you're not on such a network I don't think it's a particularly good idea to trust that another party's network is secure.
the combination of using non-routed addresses and dropping source routed frames (as everyone and their mom does by default) means that a NAT does provide some significant security. Attacks generally rely on packets reaching their destination.
No... No it doesn't. The ability to track the state of all the connections and drop packets that don't belong to any that were established by a local machine gets you the security. It just so happens that NAT requires that you implement this underlying framework, but keep this framework and remove the NAT and you still have about as much security. The only thing NAT gets you over and above this is to hide your internal network topography, which is of questionable value and turns out to be very harmful to a lot of legitimate stuff many people want to do.
In some cases yes, in some cases no. FTP is just stupid no matter how you slice it, sorry.
No, FTP isn't stupid - it was invented before firewalls were thought of and did the job it was designed to do very well. However, most people don't use the full functionality of the protocol and can therefore get away with something more simplistic that plays better with these newfangled firewall things.
Most newer protocols have some facility for NAT traversal, or at least work with a SOCKS proxy.
NAT traversal is flakey at best - even the STUN RFC admits that it is not, nor can it be, reliable. STUN (and other forms of NAT traversal) are a best effort way to make the best of a bad job and they work most of the time, but by no means should they be considered a good solution.
As for SOCKS, I've not seen anything using especially recent protocols provide any kind of support for SOCKS proxies. Certainly when it comes to applications that need to use UDP, whilst SOCKS 5 does support UDP I've never actually seen anything try.
Re:Get a Clue! (Score:3, Informative)