Towards a secure and accessible internet over IPV6

Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) was introduced to curb a fundamental scalability issue facing the internet; the IP exhaustion problem. IPv6 tackled this by introducing a significantly larger address space (2^128 addresses) compared to that of its predecessor IPv4 (2^32 addresses). IPv6’s virtually unlimited address space has rendered tools/methods, developed for assessing the security and accessibility of IPv4 networks, obsolete. Specifically, methodologies for capturing Internet scanning traffic and probing state censorship architectures, developed in the context of IPv4’s limited address space, are ineffective when applied to IPv6 networks. A recent surge in threats incident on IPv6 networks coupled with increased adoption of the protocol mandates that we build IPv6-specific frameworks to characterize and mitigate these threats.