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5 DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
6 DEPLOYING IPv6: EXPLORING THE ISSUES
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8 WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2004
9 9:00 A.M.
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12 DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
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14 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20230
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20 Reported and transcribed by: Deborah Turner, CVR
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1 PANEL PARTICIPANTS
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3 Mr. Michael D. Gallagher, Department of Commerce
4 Dr. Vinton Cerf, MCI
5 Dr. Michael Gallaher, RTI
6 Mr. Dan Caprio, Department of Commerce
7 Dr. Mark Skall, NIST
8 Mr. Joseph Watson, NTIA
9 Mr. Stan Barber, Verio
10 Mr. Mark Desautels, CTIA
11 Dr. Paul Francis, Cornell University
12 Mr. Tony Hain, Cisco
13 Mr. Henry Kafka, BellSouth
14 Dr. Latif Ladid, IPv6 Forum
15 Dr. Paul Liao, Panasonic
16 Mr. Mark Rotenberg, EPIC
17 Mr. Jim Bound, North American Task Force
18 Ms. Marilyn Kraus, DoD
19 Mr. Preston Marshall, DARPA
20 Dr. Douglas Maughan, Department of Homeland Security
21 Mr. Gene Sokolowski, GSA
22 Dr. Rick Summerhill, Internet2
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1 PANEL PARTICIPANTS (Cont'd)
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3 Mr. Ted Tanner, Microsoft
4 Mr. Rick White, TechNet
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 - - - - -
3 ASSISTANT SECRETARY GALLAGHER: Good morning, everybody.
4 As most of you know, I'm Mike Gallagher. I'm the Director
5 of NTIA and the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for
6 Communications and Information. And on behalf of
7 Secretary Evans I am delighted to welcome you to the
8 Department of Commerce and our meeting today on IPv6.
9 I also would like to welcome David Skall who is
10 the Acting Director of the Information Technology lab at
11 NIST. He'll be comoderating our panels this morning.
12 And as you most of you know the IPv6 effort is a
13 joint effort, this task force between the Department of
14 Commerce and NIST and it's in that spirit of partnership
15 that we are here today.
16 The Internet has revolutionized communications
17 in the United States and throughout the world. In less
18 than a decade the Internet has become the primary
19 mechanism for the dissemination, retrieval and exchange of
20 information between and among millions of computer users
21 worldwide, not just here in the United States.
22 But today, here in the United States over 60
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1 percent of homes have computers in them and over 60
2 percent of homes access the Internet.
3 Broadband adoption in the United States stands
4 today at 25 percent of homes roughly and is growing and
5 mobility is on the rise.
6 Today there are 164 million mobile wireless
7 subscribers in the United States and that number, as we
8 have seen in the recent reports from the mobile wireless
9 companies, continues to grow rapidly.
10 We also enjoy new technologies that are coming
11 on the scene like Wi-Fi and WiMAX and XG which we'll hear
12 a little bit about hopefully today.
13 And it's also a time of dynamic and exciting
14 growth but also disruptive change. So it's important that
15 we as a government, we as policymakers, closely examine
16 the trends in the marketplace, understand the technologies
17 and the opportunities before us and help manage at least
18 the federal government enterprise through these times of
19 interesting change.
20 Because these are also times of viruses and
21 worms and spam and other vulnerabilities to our cyber
22 infrastructure that were not even contemplated several
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1 years ago, so today's meeting examines one of the elements
2 that lies at the heart of the Internet, the Internet
3 protocol or IP.
4 IP not only provides a standardized envelope for
5 Internet communications, it also contains headers and the
6 headers that provide addressing, routing and message
7 handling information that enables a message to be directed
8 to its final destination over the various media that
9 comprise the Internet.
10 The current generation of IP, IP version 4 has
11 been in use for more than 20 years and has supported the
12 Internet's growth over the last decade. With the
13 commercialization of the Internet concerns were raised
14 about the ability of IP version 4 to accommodate emerging
15 demand especially the anticipated demand for unique
16 Internet addresses.
17 As a result the Internet Engineering Task Force
18 or IETF, the people who brought us IP version 4 began
19 working on the next generation of IP, which became IPv6.
20 Proponents of IPv6 assert that it has a number
21 of potential benefits as compared to version 4 most
22 notably a vast increase in the number of Internet
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1 addresses.
2 Hardware manufactures and software developers
3 are beginning to incorporate IPv6 into their products,
4 particularly routers and operating systems. To date,
5 however, there appear to be few IPv6-based services and
6 applications available in the U.S. market. On the other
7 hand, a number of foreign governments, especially those in
8 Asia, have announced plans to push deployment of IPv6.
9 These developments have raised questions about
10 the pace of IPv6 deployment in the United States. The
11 President's 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace
12 directed the Department of Commerce to form a task force
13 to examine the issues related to IPv6 including cost and
14 benefits of deploying IPv6 and the appropriate role of
15 government in that process.
16 After reviewing public comments on the issue the
17 task force recently made available a discussion draft that
18 explores these and other IPv6 related issues.
19 This meeting is another stage in the Task
20 Force's effort to develop sound policy recommendations for
21 the President on this important topic. And after we have
22 fully discussed IPv6 I hope there will be time to consider
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1 the mystery of what happened to IP version 5. (Laughter.)
2 We are very lucky to have with us today experts
3 from business, academia and government who will help us
4 grapple with the many policy facets of IPv6.
5 The first panel will consider the costs and
6 benefits of adopting IPv6, what new and different
7 capabilities that IPv6 can make available and what costs
8 consumers and benefits will have to incur to take
9 advantage of these capabilities.
10 The second panel will consider what role, if
11 any, the federal government should play in the market-
12 driven process that will largely determine the rate and
13 scope of deployment of IPv6 in the United States.
14 We are also very grateful to have here today
15 Vint Cerf. He's the Senior Vice President of Technology
16 Strategy at MCI. He is also one of the names that we
17 associate very closely with the origination and creation
18 of the Internet.
19 He's a friend of the Department of Commerce and
20 a partner in virtually every Internet policy development
21 that we pursue here and we are very pleased to have Vint
22 here with us today.
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1 And Vint is going to start our forum with a
2 brief set of explanations of IPv6, what it is and why we
3 should care about it. So, Vint, if you'd like to take us
4 through that we look forward to your energizing thoughts.
5 DR. CERF: I appreciate that. Good morning,
6 everyone. And thank you very much, Secretary Gallagher,
7 for a kind introduction, a warm welcome at the Department
8 of Commerce.
9 I hope you all notice that I'm not using
10 PowerPoint and many of you know my favorite expression now
11 is "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."
12 So I'm trying to practice speaking without the benefit of
13 that ubiquitous tool.
14 Let me try to respond immediately to your IPv5
15 question. There are some old-timers in this room who do
16 remember that we actually never had an IP version 1 or 2.
17 What happened is that we started with something called TCP
18 and only after we got past the second iteration to the
19 third one did we realize we needed to split the TCP
20 protocol into two parts.
21 The IP part was introduced in part to allow for
22 real-time interactions that didn't require sequenced
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1 delivery or guaranteed delivery of the information.
2 One of the examples that was used to drive the
3 splitting of TCP and IP was packetized voice. And so
4 we're back in the 1977 period considering how this
5 Internet technology could be made to carry real-time
6 traffic including speech but also things like missile
7 tracks, radar returns and things like that.
8 The point that was well made by Danny Cohen who
9 was one of the pioneers in packetized speech was that the
10 real-time traffic was kind of like milk and the file
11 transfer was kind of like wine.
12 You needed to deliver milk quickly before it
13 spoiled and you didn't mind if you spilled a little bit in
14 the process. Wine, on the other hand gets better over
15 time and so it's okay to take your time delivering that
16 because it will be better if it's all there when you need
17 it. So in those early years we were persuaded that we
18 needed to have a distinction between the IP layer and the
19 TCP layer.
20 The question about IPv5 is easily answered.
21 Once we realized that we needed to have a capability to
22 support real-time traffic we then began to explore video
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1 and voice conferencing using packet modes of
2 communication. So we explored a new version of IP which
3 was designed for what was called streaming protocols. It
4 was IPv5, was ST for streaming transfers.
5 That involved quite a bit of hair and mechanics,
6 frankly, to set up and tear down state in order to be
7 sensitive to the steaming requirements of these real-time
8 modalities. And ultimately it was more complicated than
9 anyone really wanted and so we frankly abandoned the IPv5
10 protocol development but as is the practice in the
11 Internet world we didn't reuse the identifier and so we
12 simply took the next one.
13 Now, in fact, during the period of panic when we
14 thought we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses much
15 sooner than we actually have, several contending protocols
16 were proposed as the IP next generation. And so we
17 actually have IPv6, IPv7, IPv8, all defined and IPv9. So
18 there were 6, 7, 8 and 9; there were four different
19 proposals that were considered and ultimately the one
20 which was chosen is now what we call IPv6.
21 But those other protocols are also defined and
22 so if we go to something after IPv6 it will have to be
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1 IPv10 because v9 and 8 and 7 are already taken.
2 ASSISTANT SECRETARY GALLAGHER: Well, hopefully,
3 you’ll be around to explain all that when that happens.
4 DR. CERF: Right. Well, actually this is kind
5 of like -- remember the Y2K problem? I'm anticipating
6 that somewhere around the year 9999 somebody is going to
7 say those idiots, why didn't they put a fifth digit on the
8 -- you know, when they had the chance way back in 1999?
9 Now, we have to go through this stupid stuff again.
10 Well, I don't know. I hope I am around when we
11 hit it. Frankly when Bob Kahn and I started working on
12 this stuff we recognized that we needed to have a protocol
13 that would run on top of virtually any communication
14 system.
15 So you all know about my t-shirt that says IP on
16 everything. With the v6 protocols, I guess it's got to be
17 IP everywhere or something like that. There are 128 bits
18 of address space in the version 6 IP packet format.
19 That's enough for about four times ten to the 38th
20 distinct terminations.
21 At one point I used to run around saying that
22 that's enough address space so that every electron in the
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1 universe can have its own web page if it wants to until I
2 got an e-mail from a good friend at Caltech; Dear Dr.
3 Cerf, you jerk. There's ten to the 88th electrons in the
4 universe and you're off by 50 orders of magnitude. That's
5 bad even for government work. So I don't say that
6 anymore.
7 One of the primary attractions to the IPv6
8 design is simply it does have more address space and in
9 that sense it emulates the v4 except that it just gives us
10 more room to point to terminations.
11 It's also been restructured somewhat for
12 efficiency and there are a few extra features that have
13 been put in like a flow ID which we have not yet really
14 capitalized on.
15 It could be that no one will figure out what to
16 do but the concept was to have a way of identifying flows
17 of traffic that we needed to treat as kind of a common
18 collection of packets that needed to be treated in a
19 certain way.
20 It's fair to say however that just introducing
21 IPv6 is a nontrivial exercise. If it were the case that
22 we were designing the Net all over again and there was
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1 nothing and we were starting with IPv6 this would be
2 easier in the same sense that it was easier to do v4.
3 For example, the core of the network was all v4
4 and the network grew from the core out. And that meant
5 that you always had connectivity in the v4 world.
6 The v6 world coming into, being born into a
7 network which is ubiquitous in v4 but not ubiquitous in v6
8 enters in a rather different state and so we end up
9 wondering what to do about the islands of v6 connectivity
10 that now need to be linked to each other somehow.
11 It isn't just there. It's something you have to
12 work on. So there are various techniques that have been
13 evolved in order to help this connectivity process along.
14 One of them is called tunneling and it's a way of taking a
15 v6 source and a v6 destination and passing traffic
16 encapsulated in IPv4 between the source and the
17 destination.
18 That has all kinds of interesting side effects.
19 I mean, the thing which the v6 packet is encapsulated in
20 has a finite amount of space and that means that you've
21 actually eroded some of it for purposes of putting an
22 embedded packet header in. So that has a side effect on
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1 the applications that are pushing traffic through the
2 tunnels.
3 There are all these kinds of little details that
4 have to be dealt with. We will still have firewalls, for
5 example, which were not part of the original Internet
6 architecture. They kind of grew up as a side effect of
7 people trying to protect themselves from various forms of
8 attack. And your comment earlier about virus and worms is
9 quite timely because we do have to fight these things off.
10 So we have firewalls which we have to traverse.
11 I would submit that the conceptual difference between v4
12 and v6 is de minimis in terms of how you configure a
13 firewall to allow passage of a v6 packet or v4 packet
14 through it.
15 But then there are also these things called
16 network address translation boxes which are, in part, a
17 side effect of not having enough v4 address space to
18 simply allocate it freely. So we have even commercial
19 interests that interfere with the free allocation of v4.
20 If you happen to be a cable modem user you may
21 discover that your cable modem provider says well, you get
22 one IP address. I don't care how many computers you have
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1 at home.
2 I won't say who my cable provider is but I
3 called and said, well, I would like five or six addresses
4 please because I needed to refer to these devices
5 externally from wherever I was in the world, like the
6 printer and so on, and they said, well, we can do that.
7 It will be an extra $5 a month for each IP address.
8 And I remember biting my tongue and wanting to
9 say many bad words. I invented this stuff. I shouldn't
10 have to pay another $5 a month. But I didn't. So I don't
11 want to minimize the challenges associated with deploying
12 the IPv6 into an already connected v4 environment.
13 The Network Address Translation boxes which in a
14 sense interfere with the end-to-end addressing of the
15 network are a kind of architectural abomination but
16 they're there and at one point the Internet architecture
17 board debating what to do about the introduction of v6,
18 the mechanisms, suggested that maybe the NAT boxes could
19 become stepping stones for the introduction of version 6
20 protocol in the midst of a sea of IPv4.
21 So you could be talking IPv6 at the edge and the
22 NAT box would actually translate into v4, pass the packets
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1 to the other end and pop them back out on the other side.
2 So it could be that these boxes that some of us don't like
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