Government Technology - October 2007 - (Page 24)

OCT_07 space available for the Internet protocol is 4.3 billion unique terminations. It’s called IP version 4, and the address space is 32 bits long, and those 32 bits are not used absolutely 100 percent efficiently. So we can foresee a time when the allocations of addresses will end, at least from the ICANN point of view. Its IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] function hands out address space to the regional Internet registries, which in turn hand them out to the Internet service providers [ISPs]. We can foresee a time around 2011 when there won’t be any more address space for IANA to hand out. By that time, I’d like to see everyone ready to operate using IP version 6. It was standardized some years ago, probably in 1995 or 1996. But in the 10-year interim, there has been enough IPv4 address space available — and certain types of hacks, called network address translation, have allowed the Internet user and provider communities to avoid moving to IPv6. But they can’t avoid that after 2011. So I’ve been encouraging everyone to move quickly to have a v6 capability in parallel with v4. Some people speak as if you throw a switch and everyone is running v6, but these will have to run in parallel for some time. If you’re a server, you want to have both v4 and v6 access to the Internet so that you won’t care whether your customers come to Vint Cerf is commonly you with either protocol. The reason IPv6 is important is that it has a 128referred to as one of the Internet’s founding bit address space — that’s about 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses or fathers, and has been 3.4 x 1038. honored by many organizations for his The technology is more or less tremendous contributhere. Software makers have already tions in the computer produced it in the routers. It’s sitting science ﬁeld, such in Windows Vista, or XP for that as receiving the matter. It’s sitting in the Macintosh Presidential Medal OS X. And it’s available in Linux and of Freedom in 2005. the other derivatives of UNIX. There are still some issues associated with all the network management software that needs to run simultaneously with v4 and v6, and the ISPs have not been offering IPv6 service readily because people haven’t been asking for it. People need to realize that when you do run out of v4 address space, the only way to expand is to have v6 capability. We want to be there ahead of time so we don’t have a big crisis. The second thing happening in the Internet is making the domain name system capable of expressing identifiers using scripts other than Roman characters. We’d like people to be able to make registrations in Cyrillic if they happen to speak Russian or Bulgarian, or one of the languages that uses the Cyrillic script, or in Farsi, Arabic or Urdu, which is the Arabic ONE AREA WHERE I’VE BEEN VOCAL, ALONG WITH OTHERS, HAS TO DO WITH HOW OPEN THE INTERNET ACCESS METHODS ARE. script, or in Korean which uses Hangul, or in Chinese which uses the Chinese syllabary, and so on. ICANN has been working to adopt standards, which are being devised by the Internet engineering task force for the use of these scripts beyond simply Latin characters. We are coming to a time now where testing is going on to put entries in the root zone file of the domain name space. The root is the thing that points to the “.us” and the “.fr” and the “.com” and the “.net” and “.org.” So those roots today only have things in it that are expressed in Latin characters. We are going to test putting things in the root that express identifiers in things like using Cyrillic script, Arabic script and so on — 11 of them altogether. We’re hoping that sometime in 2008, we will be able to accept applications for new top-level domains that are expressed in these other scripts. The third thing going on is called DNSSEC, which means Domain Name System Security. The domain system maps from names — Gmail.com, for instance — to IP addresses. With DNSSEC, when your computer asks, “What’s the IP address associated with this domain name?” we’d like to offer a digitally signed answer. This guarantees to the consumer of the DNS service that the information they receive has not been altered since it was placed in the domain name system. There are some forms of attack against the domain name system today, which involve what we call pollution or compromise of the caches, which is information that’s accumulated by a resolver that’s near you. Right now, someone can attack the resolver and give www.google.com the wrong IP address, and send you to the wrong place. That would not be a good thing, certainly, from Google’s point of view. More importantly, if that happened to your bank account, you wouldn’t want to have a party running an application looking like your bank, but it’s really someone saying, “Please give me your username and password.” Digital signatures are one way of removing opportunities for misleading people in the network. GT: HOW WILL GOVERNMENT REGULATION INFLUENCE IPV6 ACCEPTANCE AND MOBILE INTERNET CONNECTIVITY? CERF: One area where I’ve been vocal, along with others, has to do with how open the Internet access methods are. When the Internet was first becoming available to the public in the early to mid-1990s, most people got access to the network by dialing an Internet service provider. If you didn’t like the service from one Internet service provider, you could dial a different telephone number and switch to another. When broadband capability emerged from cable modems and digital subscriber loops, the number of competing ISPs collapsed to the point where some people have no broadband access at all. The FCC estimated in 2005 that something like 60 percent of the country had a choice of either DSL or cable, 30 percent had one but not both, and 10 percent had no broadband at all, often in the rural parts of the country. Even where there are two competitors, it isn’t clear the degree to which that drives prices down and increases quality. So this absence of competition is of some concern. Another concern is that the parties offering these broadband facilities — and also the parties that offer wireless capability — are designing business models that constrain what applications are permitted. This isn’t as open an environment as the Internet has been in the past. It’s the 28 C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 24 http://www.google.com http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - October 2007

Contents Point of View Big Picture The Last Mile GT Spectrum Letters How It Works Cerf on the Net Way Back Machine Separation Anxiety Let's Roll Rising to the Challenge Wednesday Afternoon Fever Parking Possibilities Products Signal: Noise

Government Technology - October 2007

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