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Consumer Trends - Devices
Consumer devices
- Broadband users
- PDAs, Smartphones, Webpads
- Home appliances
- Mobile computers
Consequences
- With dial-up, 25 users => 1 IP address
- Now, 1 user => 1 IP address
- Devices are always-on, always connected => always attacked
- Switching between wireless networks must be transparent to the user
- Peer-to-peer connectivity is key
- Network “plug and play”
- Security that goes beyond network edge firewalls
Notes:
To better understand why we need a paradigm change and the widespread adaptation of IPv6, we have to look at consumer trends. Broadband users put a much larger demand on ISPs, as every customer now needs a globally unique IP address. In contrast a group of dial-up users can share a single IP address, as each users is connected to the network for only short periods of time. The explosive growth of broadband, the emergence of smart phones, PDAs and other mobile computers has increased the need to provide global addresses to users who are always on, and always online. As users move around from one WiFi network to another it becomes increasingly important to provide a mechanism that would allow transparent switching from one network to another without braking all existing connections. We must also provide an automatic way for computers to join networks without the problems of DHCP, or static addressing.
Furthermore, we must look at the consequence that the widespread of always on devices brings. Besides increasing the demand for global addresses, the needs to secure always connected devices has increased tremendously. IPv4 simply does not provide sufficient mechanism to prevent spoofing or man-in-the-middle attacks. Instead, NAT provides an illusion of security of many users, making it usually the only line of defense to many home networks. A compromised network is most often used to attack others, only a widespread change in the way we think about security will make a major difference.
The connectivity between peers is key in today’s Internet, as the most promising applications today are P2P.