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While most of the world is still coming to grips with malware and weaning itself off of IPv4, we're just learning that China has been thinking further ahead. A newly publicized US Navy report reveals that China's new internet backbone revolves around an IPv6-based architecture that leans on Source Address Validation Architecture, or SAVA. The technique creates a catalog of known good matches between computers and their IP addresses, and blocks traffic when there's a clear discrepancy. The method could curb attempts to spread malware through spoofing and tackle some outbreaks automatically -- and, perhaps not so coincidentally, complicate any leaps over the Great Firewall. Even with the existence of that potential curb on civil liberties, the improved backbone could still keep network addresses and security under reasonable control when China expects that over 70 percent of its many, many homes will have broadband in the near future.
"China has a national internet backbone in place that operates under IPv6 as the native network protocol. We have nothing like that in the US."
As easy as it is to dismiss China's Internet as closed and stifling, the reality of the situation is that its architecture is new and shiny compaired to the aging framework being used in much of the western world. And having that sturdier, more future-proof structure is going to put China at an advantage as we all trudge onward into the future. We've got some catching up to do, but we probably don't want to be too much like China.
Your IPv4 address on the public Internet appears to be 109.182.154.200
Your IPv6 address on the public Internet appears to be 2002:6db6:9ac8::6db6:9ac8
"China has a national internet backbone in place that operates under IPv6 as the native network protocol," says Riley. "We have nothing like that in the US."
Internet Engineering Task Force - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaIPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).[1][2] It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements.
All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by Verisign and the U.S. government's National Security Agency.[3]
While it is true that the internet was first created by the american, but there is no denying the international contribution to the subsequent advancement of the internet.The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage; each constituent network sets its own policies. Only the overreaching definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by contributing technical expertise.
And now, we found out that the Chinese actually has implemented in 2008 the solutions to the finding of that particular US Navy report that was done in 2008 but only released this week.At the root of the problem, says the New Scientist, are two major gaps in the architecture of the internet, according to a report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, compiled in 2008 for the US Navy and released to the public this week. Those gaps include firstly an inability to block malware as a whole rather than after recognizing individual instances, and secondly although not made explicit in the article the lack of IPv4 capacity for future internet expansion.
The two technologies that are best suited to solve these problems are SAVA for malware and IPv6 for space both of which are being implemented in Chinas next-generation internet project. But SAVA is hardly new, nor its use by China unknown. In 2007 Jianping Wu at Chinas Beijing Tsinghua University published a paper, Source Address Validation: Architecture and Protocol Design, that explained, This architecture is deployed into the CNGI-CERNET2 infrastructure - a large-scale native IPv6 backbone network of the China Next Generation Internet project. We believe that the Source Address Validation Architecture will help the transition to a new, more secure and sustainable Internet.
Wu expanded on this in 2008, in Building a next generation Internet with source address validation architecture. In this he explains how SAVA can be implemented to make the internet more secure since every packet transmitted across the network will hold an authenticated source IP address. That address must be authorized, unique and traceable. The packets that do not hold an authenticated source address will not be forwarded in network. Therefore it is impossible to launch network attacks with spoofed source addresses, he wrote.
Other advantages he mentions include fine grained network management, where providers can easily bill users based on their end-to-end usage, as is the case with telephony; application authentication without the need for cryptography; and the acceleration of new internet applications. For the last, he notes, P2P applications and other large scale multimedia applications (for example, VoIP using SIP), can be accelerated in deployment and improved in performance by using globally unique authenticated IPv6 addresses.
That last point is important. While SAVA is applicable for IPv4 networks it is designed for IPv6 networks, he continues. The fundamental reason for Chinas next-generation internet being more advanced than anything in the West is not some secret project but its more rapid deployment of IPv6, something the West is still struggling with. The New Scientist quotes Donald Riley, an information systems specialist at the University of Maryland: If you are thinking about the future of the internet, anyone that explores that territory and maps it out first has a definite competitive advantage; especially with the resources available to China.