Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Mon Apr 19 13:00:10 UTC 2010


On Apr 19, 2010, at 6:54 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Patrick W. Gilmore:
> 
>>> Reality is that as soon as SSL web servers and SSL-capable web
>>> browsers have support for name-based virtual hosts, the number of
>>> IPv4 addresses required will drop.  Right now, you need 1 IP
>>> address for 1 SSL site; SNI spec of SSL gets rid of that.
>> 
>> Agreed.
>> 
>> When do you expect Windows XP & earlier versions to be a small enough
>> segment of the userbase that businesses will consider DoS'ing those
>> customers?   My guess is when the cost of additional v4 addresses is
>> higher than the profit generated by those customers.
>> 
>> Put another way: Not until it is too late.
> 
> I'm not so sure.  Name-based virtual hosting for plain HTTP was
> introduced when Windows NT 4.0 was still in wide use.  It originally
> came with Internet Explorer 2.0, which did not send the Host: header
> in HTTP requests.

NT4 was never heavily adopted by users.  Also, not nearly as many billions were being sold on e-commerce sites.


> Anyway, I think the TLS thing is a bit of a red herring.  It might be
> a popular justification for IP space at the formal level, but
> real-world requirements are a bit more nuanced.  FTP and SSH/SFTP do
> not support name-based virtual hosting, so if you're a web hoster and
> structured things around "one IPv4 address per customer", then there
> might be another obstacle to collapsing everything on a single IPv4
> address.  It's also difficult to attribute DoS attackers at sub-HTTP
> layers to a customer if everything is on a single IPv4 address, making
> mitigation a bit harder.

Since the vast majority of non-SSL HTTP is served off shared IP addresses, I would have to disagree.  Also, it is trivial to dump FTP/SSH sessions into the correct directory on a shared backend system.  So SSL does seem to me to be the big problem with the hosting side of the house.

But end of day, we do agree.  I do not see the growth in certs being the limiting factor here.  There are far more users than websites, so even if we could wave a magic wand and get back all HTTP/SSL IP addresses, we would still have a large problem.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick





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