Open Forum: Security Challenges with IPv6

There is no doubt that the imminent worldwide launch of IPv6 June 6, 2012 heralds a new era of Internet infrastructure worldwide, both in terms of evolution and widespread adoption.

The world has already had a taste of the new protocol last June, when the IPv6 World Day.

Led by the Internet Society, more than 1,000 websites, high-tech companies and ISPs have been encouraged to shift to IPv6 collectively for a period of 24 hours to "test" the protocol and try to anticipate technical problems that might occur during the official launch.

June 6, 2012, key organizations and high-tech leaders like Google Web, Facebook and Yahoo, among others, will switch to the new Internet protocol during official global launch.

And the transition becomes increasingly necessary. The current protocol IPv4, which supports about 3.7 billion addresses, was simply exhausted the stock of available addresses, in part due to the explosion of mobile devices.

But IPv6, in turn, has an unlimited capacity of addresses, which allows it to adapt to a mobile infrastructure and growing Internet world.

However, with the imminent launch of the Global IPv6 protocol, researchers and IT professionals anticipate some challenges, especially in security.

The novelty and lack of knowledge relating to IPv6 as there will inevitably configuration errors, compatibility issues and other blunders implementation.

There is no institutional knowledge about IPv6 that was on IPv4, which has been used for decades and offers a broad knowledge base.

But perhaps the most important security challenge is that many network security appliances are able to transfer IPv6 traffic, but not to inspect it.

And as IPv6 is enabled by default on many platforms current network - such as Windows 7 - these systems are already installed on the network.