For the Air Force, the killer application for IPv6 might literally be a killer app.
“We’re trying to shorten the kill chain,” USAF transition lead Eric Lubeck said Tuesday at the IPv6 Tech Forum hosted by AFSCEA. “Anything we can use to put bombs accurately on target is our goal with IPv6.”
Lubeck was part of a panel of government and industry experts discussing uses for the new IPv6-enabled networks and the challenges users will face.
The Defense Department, along with civilian agencies, has set a goal of transitioning its networks to the next generation of Internet Protocols by July 2008. But a successful transition to IPv6 will merely establish parity with existing networks. The return on the investment will depend on how applications take advantage of the new functionality. Unfortunately, there still are many unanswered questions about what will happen when networks begin using IPv6.
“A lot of security experts are comfortable on how to defend the network of today,” Lubeck said. “We really don’t know what the mobile network of the future is going to look like, so we don’t know how to secure them.”
What issues will network administrators face when they begin running dual-stack networks to handle both IPv4 and v6 traffic?
“We don’t know,” said Dave West, director of field operations for Cisco Systems.
Testing boxes and applications does not necessarily tell you what will happen to the network when it switches to a dual-stack mode to handle IPv6 traffic. Cisco is just beginning to look beyond the individual boxes and applications, West said.
“We have started to look at this architecturally, rather than just product by product,” he said. “And what you find when you look at it architecturally is [that] there are a lot of holes in what we know.”
But vendors remain committed to the move to IPv6.
“We are betting our business strategy on IPv6 and IPSec,” said Sean Siler, Microsoft Corp.’s program manager for IPv6 deployment. “You are going to see a lot of IPv6 and IPSec solutions coming out of Microsoft in the very near future.”
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