Advantages And Disadvantages Of Ipv6

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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) introduced IPv6 in early 90’s as a solution to the depleting address space provided by IPv4. Global Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) gave out the last block of IPv4 addresses in February 2011, making the need to move to IPv6 urgent. Today the question “why to implement IPv6?” has been reframed to “how to implement IPv6?” (Vaughan-Nichols, 2012). With more and more organizations adopting IPv6 for their network, it has now been realized that IPv6 is not just a solution to the limited address space provided by IPv4 but also a path to innovations. But with all the advantages IPv6 provides over IPv4, it is also accompanied with certain disadvantages. This paper focuses on the security issues involved with IPv6. The paper discusses some improvements in IPv6 security features compared to IPv4, new security threats faced by IPv6 and some solutions to improve IPv6 security.

INTRODUCTION
Internet Protocol version four (IPv4) was introduced by International Engineering Task Force (IETF) is 1981 via RFC 791 as a feasible solution to connect computers for communication. With a 32 bit address space covering 2^32 addresses, it was considered sufficient to provide an IP address to all users over the world. But with the requirement of IP for various technologies like sensor networks, Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFID), cell phones, home appliances, and, automobiles resulted in the depletion of the IPv4 address space (Marsan, 2011) and the emergence of IPv6 in 1995 via RFC 1885 and later RFC 2460 in 1998. IPv6 provides certain advantages over IPv4, such as larger address space, better routing table manageability, address auto-configuration, and better security features as compared to IPv4 (C...

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... al., 2009).
4. Dual stack and Tunneling: Dual stack is a more preferred mechanism for transition from IPv4 to IPv6, thus providing an organization to support applications for both IPv6 and IPv4. Also, if tunneling is implemented, it is beneficial to use static tunneling when compared to dynamic tunneling as it gives the administrator more control over the transition mechanism (Ashford, 2012).
CONCLUSION
This paper recognized the improvements in IPv6 compared to IPv4, from a security point of view. It also discussed new security threats faced by IPv6 and some measures that can be taken to improve IPv6 security. Although IPv6 provides security improvements compared to IPv4, it does not solve all security threats faced by IPv4. With the fast emergence of IPv6, it is necessary to introduce better security mechanisms that can protect IPv6 networks from security attacks.

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