On Jul 2, 2007, at 11:06 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
Of course, almost none of the issues above are likely to go away, or even get better, with IPv6... unless we make some improvements elsewhere. And none of them make NAT a good idea, just a "solution" that won't easily go away unless we have plausible alternatives for _all_ of its purported advantages, not just the address space one.
The initial use of IPv6 in North America will likely involve Teredo enabled NATs and Teredo servers. It does not seem NATs will go away anytime soon, especially those adding Teredo compliance to ensure multi-player games function without router configuration.
Unfortunately many exploits now bypass protections once afforded by NATs or peripheral firewalls. Browsers are always in transition and can be exploited with their many hooks into OS services and applications. It seems security is sacrificed to enable some new proprietary interface. This is an area where standardization has seemly failed.
Browser exploits have become so pervasive as to require our company to extensively retool behavior evaluations. For example, SMTP reputations are being converted to a progressive scale to adjust for the growing prevalence of 0wned systems. It seems much of the malware activity is just harder to detect.
It gets worse. NATs are not a complete solution, and represent a new challenge. PNRP clouds combined with new complex routing paths represents a risk that will be even harder to evaluate and to enforce policies in a scaleable fashion.
In the early days of the Internet, the level of commerce and related crime was far lower than it is today. People are now filing their Federal taxes on-line. What the Internet is being used for has changed significantly. When defending against criminal exploits, there is less doubt about risks. The hazards are very apparent, although they might be harder to detect.
The security section for the "next great idea" should carefully review and strategize how the world is to handle resulting abuse. That section is unfortunately significantly growing in importance every day. What seemed like a good idea, can easily become a nightmare.
-Doug _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf