Summer is turning into fall and we are just three months away from the US IPv6 Summit 2004, to be held Dec. 8-10, 2004 (tutorial Dec. 7) at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, a short drive west of Washington, DC. With messages about the summit going out to 1.8 million people, this will almost certainly be the largest IPv6 event ever held in North America, probably represent a new growth spurt for IPv6 events here. The first North American IPv6 summits attracted 150 to 180 people. The next wave of IPv6 summits (in San Diego and Arlington in 2003 and in Santa Monica in 2004) where organized by IPv6 Summit, Inc., the team that publishes this newsletter, and attracted 400 people for San Diego and just over 500 for Arlington and Santa Monica. The driver for the last three summits has been, indirectly, the US Department of Defense, whose CIO John Stenbit mandated a (great) transition to IPv6 on lucky Friday the 13th, June 2003. With this summit, the DoD gets directly involved and is teaming up with our team to recruit the people with the most relevant expertise to the US government and related industry as speakers and participants. Dr. Charles (Chuck) Lynch, co-chairman of the event, will also be a keynote speaker, and describe his highly sought after insights and experiences as the Chief of the Department of Defense IPv6 Transition Office. Please mark the dates on your calendars or your Palm-like devices - Dec. 7-10. If you don't have a Palm device, you can note this the old fashioned way - on your own palm. We look forward to talking with you face to face in Reston.

This September issue of 6Sense is short but powerful, with three articles, one each for the core coverage of IPv6, technology, organizations, and applications. We start with a technical article on the other important DoD mandate, of DDS (Data Distribution Service), including some advantages and future possibilities to explore, written by Joe Schlesselman and Mark Hamilton. We are fortunate to have an organizational/governmental article by Marcus Sachs with insights into how the recently famous Cybersecurity czar Richard Clarke came to embrace IPv6 while at the White House (thankfully the DoD picked up the v6 football and is running full out for a touchdown - otherwise the game might be stalled out). Third, we have an application overview by IPv6 Summit, Inc.'s own Christopher Harz, on IPv6 in Geographic Information Systems, virtual reality, and storage methods formerly the stuff of science fiction (actually, most innovations were formerly the stuff of science fiction). We hope you enjoy this issue, and again, invite you to submit your own article if it's about IPv6 technology, organization, or applications.

Sincerely,
Alex Lightman

Adoption of the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard and IPv6 will be the two most significant IT infrastructure changes mandated by the DoD this year. This article presents a short overview of how each will benefit from the other. We highlight:

• The DDS standard and its mandated use as a Global Information Grid (GIG) Core Enterprise Service (CES) across the DoD

• DDS and the IPv4/6 Transition

• System design with DDS and IPv6

The DDS Standard and the DISR Mandate

The Data Distribution Service (DDS) for Real-time Systems Specification is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for data-centric publish-subscribe networking. DDS is a mandated standard for use across the US Department of Defense (DoD). DDS has been adopted for use in multiple programs in all branches of the service, as well as in commercial industry ...

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In November of 2002 I had the pleasure of accompanying Richard Clarke to the annual Next Generation Networks conference in Boston. Dick was the Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security, and I was one of his staff members for the National Security Council at the White House. We met Latif Ladid and Jim Bound, and discussed where we stood with respect to deploying IPv6 across America.

We were astounded to learn that there was no significant public sector push for a nation-wide migration to IPv6 -- indeed there was only a small government effort to experiment with the new protocol. Following that meeting, we discussed whether the president could announce a "shoot for the Moon" project to get the nation IPv6 compliant by the end of the decade. This would be much like President Kennedy's famous speech in 1961, when he announced a national effort to put a man safely on the Moon by the end of that decade.

Although the idea did not lead to a presidential announcement, it ultimately led to a project called Moonv6 - an undertaking to build an experimental IPv6 network that forms a prototype for future IPv6 networks. The Moonv6 project is a collaborative effort between the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory, the Defense Department's Joint Interoperability Testing Command (and various other DoD agencies), Internet2, and the North American IPv6 Task Force. Moonv6 is the most aggressive collaborative IPv6 interoperability and application demonstration in North America to date, and has proven to be an excellent testing and evaluation network for both the Defense Department and the private sector.
Another outcome of those discussions in late 2002 was the creation of a White House sponsored IPv6 steering committee, which developed recommendations that became part of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, published in February 2003. One of the document's recommendations called for the Commerce Department to determine the economic impact of two scenarios: one that avoided a nation-wide IPv6 conversion as long as possible, and a second one that rapidly moved the entire nation to IPv6 by the end of the decade. The Commerce Department recently released a white paper on their findings.

The steering committee also recognized that there are many technical and economic aspects of an IPv6 migration that need to be solved beyond just changing IP addresses. These include:

Payment for IP address space
IPv4 addresses are typically leased by end users from a pool of IP addresses controlled by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). In turn, the ISP pays an annual fee to maintain control of its IP address block(s). For IPv6 to succeed, a new model for "ownership" of IP addresses must be developed that does not involve a fee structure like IPv4's. End users should be able to obtain as many IPv6 addresses as are needed without incurring additional costs from their ISP. Otherwise, they will continue to pay for as few addresses as possible and use technologies like Network Address Translation (NAT) to hide multiple devices behind a single public IP address.

Scaling issues for device names
The Domain Name System (DNS) was designed and placed into operation over 20 years ago. The DNS will not scale to the enormous addressable space of an IPv6 Internet. In the IPv4 world there are already problems with limitations in the DNS -- imagine what scaling issues will arise as we move to v6. A new method of device naming should be developed quickly and phased in over the next several years. This method should allow for two key items - scalability and preservation of native language names - while providing for the protection of the intellectual property value contained in current domain names.

Routing and Autonomous Systems
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) also has significant scaling issues that will be stressed in an IPv6 Internet. BGP is limited to a fixed number of Autonomous Systems and a fixed number of prefixes, or address blocks, which can be advertised in a BGP update message. The concept of numbered Autonomous Systems may also need to be re-examined in light of the growth of Personal Area Networks and other ad-hoc networks that will be enabled with IPv6.

Privacy
The overwhelming desire of most IPv6 advocates is to be able to connect trillions of devices to a common communication network, all with globally unique addresses. Juxtaposed against that desire is a growing swell of concern that personal privacy is being eroded by the rapid movement of private information to the global Internet. As IPv6 begins to catch on, and enables remarkable new applications such as a digital version of a patient's chart in a hospital being linked to her/his health records stored somewhere on the Internet, we have to be very concerned about engineering the new networks to protect privacy at all costs.

Some day we will be an all-IPv6 planet, and IPv4 will be a footnote in the history books. Perhaps we'll even get IPv6-addressed devices permanently installed on the Moon, on Mars, and beyond. But before we shoot for the Moon, we need to start here at home by also ensuring that the mechanisms of the Internet support a nearly infinite address space and that they properly scale to the proportions that IPv6 will bring. We also need to permanently etch the word "security" into all new network designs and applications in order to ensure that the privacy of both individuals and intellectual property is preserved.

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A great deal of attention has been given to the infrastructure and details of communications via the New Internet (which is all necessary and good), but relatively little has been said about the related industries that will be affected by v6 for upcoming applications. That's too bad, because much of the motivation for the growth of v6 in America will come from the symbiosis between the technical and applications communities. To draw an analogy, it would be useless to develop the world's greatest videogaming platform and then not have any games ready to play on it when it came out. Similarly, the explosive growth of the automotive industry at the beginning of the 20th Century was not just due to the heroic efforts of Henry Ford, but also to the dedicated push to create thousands of miles of new roads - the two efforts supported and fed upon each other.

What, then, are some of the industries that will be vitalized by the New Internet? One characteristic of v6 is that it will lead to millions of new identifiers and sensors (including webcams, chemical sniffers, radiation and heat sensors, and so on), connected with end-to-end access capability. Determining "who" all these entities are is being well studied, with advanced addressing schemes and allocations. But the inevitable next question that will be asked of our intrepid armies of v6-enabled entities will be, "Where are you?" The answers to this question requires new generations of advanced visualization and geographic location technologies. Let's illustrate some of those issues by looking at a couple of the players in that field - any one of which might become a strategic partner for vendors of IPv6 communications products or services.

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Publisher Introduction

Shooting for the Moon
Marcus H. Sachs
Director, SANS Internet Storm Center

DDS and IPv6
Joe Schlesselman and Mark Hamilton,
Real-Time Innovations (RTI)

Strategic Teaming for IPv6 Applications
Chris Harz

U.S. IPv6 Summit 2004 - Reston, Virginia

The next IPv6 Summit event in the US will take place December 7-10 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston, Virginia

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Next Generation Wireless Applications Conference

New Customers, New Services: How to Profit from Next Generation Telecoms
Presented by Tomi T Ahonen

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