European ISP enables IPv6 for all?

Wed Dec 19 15:55:29 UTC 2007

On 19 dec 2007, at 16:16, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:

>> I'd say that the huge address space makes life impossible for  
>> scanning
>> worms.

>> That doesn't mean that there can be no successful scanning at all  
>> with
>> IPv6, but it needs to be highly targeted if you want results the same
>> year, so just pumping random numbers in the destination address field
>> like SQL slammer did so successfully doesn't cut it in IPv6.

> Just so we're all thinking about it; the issue isn't the size of the
> address space, it's the sparseness of populated addresses.  That won't
> *necessarily* always be true.

Well, if you can scan the whole space (at 15 kpps 80 hours for the  
entire IPv4 space although with random generation it's going to take  
longer than that) sparseness isn't a huge issue. If you can't scan the  
whole space (at 15 kpps 7.1 x 10^26 years for the entire IPv6 space)  
then sparseness becomes a consideration. But I still don't see how  
random scanning is going to do you much good: either so few IPv6 hosts  
are vulnerable that scanning for them isn't worth the time, or so many  
that if you can scrape some IPv6 addresses from the web you can infect  
those and they'll infect all the networks they connect to (scanning a  
LAN locally is easy).