I'm not planning to use any. I was just assuming that people who
promote v6 as the best thing since sliced bread, and needed because v4
space is really really scarce now, are going to actually find enough
toasters, printers, phones, computers or whatever to fill all those
/48s that are getting allocated.
And of course, as I said, small end sites are getting allotted /48s
through tunnelbrokers and such
So the number of hosts in there is going to be highly limited and all
that /48 worth of IPs are going to wind up bound to the same host, or
the same LAN .. with IPs that are much closer to each other.
Once you find a host on a /48 jump to the next one I guess. Or make
some guess on what IP addressing scheme is being followed and which
subnets of that /48 are being used [assuming that an end site like a
cellphone carrier decides to give v6 IPs to all its phone users] ...
scan from within the network.
Unless you say that v6 space is ever going to be as densely populated
as v4 where each IP is often a different host, possibly several miles
apart rather than in the next rack.
Once you find a host on a /48 jump to the next one I guess. Or make
some guess on what IP addressing scheme is being followed and which
subnets of that /48 are being used [assuming that an end site like a
cellphone carrier decides to give v6 IPs to all its phone users] ...
scan from within the network.
I dunno... it seems to me it'd be pretty hard to configure 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 toasters (or any combination you prefer of other devices) within any reasonable definition of "lifetime."
I suppose if one were sufficiently motivated to develop some automated tools for configuration, it'd be possible - but I suspect the power company might notice the small power blip if I plugged in all those devices (personal nuclear plant, anyone?)
Sure, with some incredible luck, you could find all those devices while you're scanning - just seems like some are crying that the sky is falling already.
Sure, with some incredible luck, you could find all those devices while
you're scanning - just seems like some are crying that the sky is falling
already.
Like I said -
I was just assuming that people who promote v6 as the best thing since sliced bread,
and needed because v4 space is really really scarce now, are going to actually find
enough toasters, printers, phones, computers or whatever to fill all those /48s that are
getting allocated.
With all due respect (!) to the v6 promotion councils out there, I
doubt, for the same reasons you do, that there'll ever be enough v6
capable hosts out there, toasters or not, to fill even a single /48,
for a long time .. but when there are .. ouch.
Given that ther's not 2**80 atoms on the planet, yes, that *would* be an ouch.
Suresh,
It seems to me that you're assuming that your access network will be
multi-gigabit in order to support millions of hosts trying to scan each of
your subnets simultaneously in order to finish in time before celebrating a
couple of centuries before now ?
Regards,
Jordi
D'oh!. There are 2**80 atoms. Somebody misremembered Avogadro's number. 
It will probably be multi terabit by the time you get enough hosts to fill a /48
But this is all a gedankenexperiment right now ..
In other words: 0wning random appliances isn't all that interesting.
Amazingly enough, the *single* biggest problem in trying to get Joe
Sixpack to secure their systems is "But I don't have anything they'd be
interested in..."
Security isn't an end in itself. For instance, I don't care enough about people using up my paper and ink to secure my print server against remote printing. However, I do care about my passwords, documents and so on.
In fact, I would much rather allow access to pretty much anything
else rather than a powerful general-purpose computer.
On the other hand, if it's got enough smarts to do an IPv6 stack and have
enough left over to have something interesting to say, it's probably
"powerful enough" for miscreants to think of creative and interesting
uses for it, even if it *is* just a toaster....
I think I didn't make my point clear. On a general purpose computer, you can install new software to make it do whatever you want. Not so for most appliances. (Although if they have way to upgrade their flash or whatever that would be a way in.)
When the number of open print servers exceeds a threshold, I predict
that 'innovative marketers' will start using zombied toasters to send
advertisements to all open print servers they can find.
And at that point, security matters very much.
Scott
There's a whole lot of servers that are printers + plain paper fax
machines, that come with a fax and print server bundled.
And junk faxes are about as old as faxes are ..
Convergence, convergence ...