InfoSec awareness month The Second Internet

CEBU, Philippines - This is your future. So, pay attention!

A so-called migration from the First Internet to the Second Internet is imminent. "Transition to the Second Internet is by far the biggest business and technology opportunity I've seen in my 38 years in IT," enthused InfoWeapons founder, chairman and chief technology officer Lawrence Hughes.

InfoWeapons Corp. creates high quality, simple-to-use, end-user tools as a response to the general lack of secure communication and IPv6 Ready tools currently available.

But how can information security professionals continue to defend a network if they don't understand the technology?

Hughes calls the 28-year-old First Internet as the Legacy Internet. Throughout a long career in Information Technology - building, programming and applying personal computers since his Altair 8800 in 1975, Hughes said that the First Internet is still relevant as the design of the Internet Protocol version 6 is based heavily on that of the First Internet's IPv4. However, there has to be an upgrade in Internet security.

"IPv4 can be considered one of the great achievements in IT history, based on its worldwide success, so it was a good model to copy from. Second, there were several attempts to do a new design "from the ground up" with IPv6 (a "complete rewrite").

"These involved really painful migration and interoperability issues. You need to understand that the strengths and weaknesses of IPv4 are to see why IPv6 evolved the way it did," Hughes said.

"You can think of IPv6 as "IPv4 on steroids," which takes into account the radical difference in the way we do networking today, and fixing problems that were encountered in the first 28 years of the Internet, as network bandwidth and number of nodes increased exponentially.

"We are doing things over networks today than no one could have foreseen a quarter of a century ago, no matter how visionary they were," he stressed.

A node, by the way, is a device (usually a computer that can do processing and has some kind of wired or wireless connection(s) to a network. Examples of nodes are desktop computers, notebook computers, netbooks, smart phones, hubs, switches, routers, wireless access points, network printers, network aware appliances, and so on.

"Hard to realize that is 28 years ago," Hughes noted, adding that "since 1983, network speeds have increased from 10 Mbit/sec to 100 Gbit/sec" or a 10,000-fold increase.

"But we are still using essentially the same Internet Protocol. Think it's about time for an upgrade?" This Bachelor of Science graduate with a Degree in Mathematics, and a minor in physics, from the Florida State University posed this question.

IPv6 security as against IPv4

Hughes, a member of Mensa International since 1973, which is a society of people whose IQ is in the top two percent of the population, also mentioned that "many people today are aware that the folks in charge of the Internet are starting to run low on addresses."

He said that "most of them are not aware that this is not the first time we've faced this, or just how low that pool of addresses is today.

"The majority of Internet uses are either completely oblivious to what is going on and think that the Internet will go on like it has, forever. If they have heard any rumors about an address shortage they have a blind faith that the people in charge can simply work some magic and the problem will go away…IPv4 is simply out of gas, and it is time to start using its successor, IPv6," Hughes, who penned the book "Internet E-mail: Protocols, Standards and Implementations" having been heavily involved with Internet e-mail security for many years, further said.

In his other book entitled "The Second Internet: Reinventing Computer Networks with IPv6" published in October 2010, he wrote that "the First Internet has impacted the lives of more than a billion people and has led to unprecedented advances in computing, communications, collaboration, research and entertainment (not to mention time-wasting and even less savory activities)."

He pointed out that the Internet is now understood to be highly strategic in every modern country's economy. "It is difficult to conceive of a country that could exist without it. Many enormous companies (such as Google) would not have been possible (or even needed) without it," he underscored.

Estimates, he said, are that there are currently about 1.3 billion nodes connected to the First Internet. Many of those have more than one user, as in those in cyber cafés.

"If you think that's impressive, wait until you see what its rapidly approaching successor, the Second Internet (made possible by IPv6) will be."

Hughes, who has this particular interest in secure digital communication, described IPv6 as an "entirely new and far more flexible communication and connectivity paradigms that will make electronic mail and texting seem quaint."

Some of IPv6's distinguishing - and impressing - characteristics include 128-bit address size, its addressing model, its packet header structure and routing.

Furthermore, there has been talk from the International Telecommunications Union about reserving some IPv6 address space for developing nations to make absolutely certain that nobody ever gets left out again, as has happened in the First Internet. "The total number of IPv6 addresses is on the same general scale as the number of grains of sand on Earth," Hughes assures.

Among the most important new aspects of IPv6 is SEND or SEcure Network Discovery. "ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) in IPv4 has several well known and easily exploited vulnerabilities, used in many hacking attacks. ARP does not exist in IPv6, so its vulnerabilities do not affect IPv6 networks."

As for Network Address Translation, Hughes explained that NAT was introduced to extend the lifetime of the IPv4 address space long enough for its replacement, IPv6, to be defined, redefined, and compliant infrastructure products and applications to be developed. "IPv6 is now fully developed and ready for prime time. NAT has served its purpose. It is time to put it out to pasture."

"With IPv6, major areas of the economy, such as telephony, entertainment, almost all consumer electronic devices (MP3 players, TVs, radios) will be heavily impacted, or even collapse into the Second Internet as yet more network applications (like e-mail and web did in the First Internet)," Hughes also said.

The number of connected nodes will likely explode in the next five-to-10 years by a factor of a hundred or more. He stressed that it's not by 100 percent. "I said by a factor of 100, which is 10,000 percent. The First Internet (the one you are using today, based on IPv4) that you think is so pervasive and so cool, is less than one percent of the expected size of the Second Internet. One of the popular terms being used to describe it is pervasive computing. That means it is going to be everywhere."

By the way, Hughes is personally involved in helping create and deploy the Second Internet for many years. He'd spoken at IPv6 summits around the world, including Cebu via the recent two-day Rootcon 5 Hackers Conference at the Parklane International Hotel. He accentuated that in these early days, the Second Internet really is somewhat of an "Asian thing," but that soon enough it will be worldwide. (FREEMAN)