The
Internet has been extremely successful, and
is now used for applications which could never
be con-ceived when it was initially developed.
One of the major problems is that there is
not enough IP addresses around to cover all
the devices which might want to connect to
the Internet. Thus mechanisms are being put
in-place to migrate towards a future system
which allows an increased number of IP addresses.
There are also security weaknesses in the
current version of IP addresses (IPv4), as
the source of a host can be easily identified
as the source address is added to the IP data
packet. The main proposed standard is IPv6,
which tries to overcome some of the current
problems. It increases the addressing range
with a 128-bit address, and thus will allow
for an almost unlimited amount of addresses.
This new standard will also al-low autoconfiguration
of network addresses, which should make it
easier for devices to connect to the Internet.
It will take a while before the Internet can
be fully IPv6, thus this paper looks at other
methods, including NAT/PAT, proxy servers
and VPNs, which allow increased security,
by hiding the source, and support private
addressing structures. [Link] |
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