Beginner cybersecurity, UK edition, Part II

November 23, 2016 9:10 AM

I'm fairly well-versed in the things I need to do at the application layer, and standard advice for avoiding internet surveillance is "use a VPN, and hope they don't store logs". But what impact would switching to IPv6 have on this standard answer?

This question is a follow-up to this question and this post.

posted by Leon to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Best answer: It depends on what you are trying to defend against - which is a kind of crap wishy washy answer. Essentially (non pedantically) IPv6 is part addressing and part transport - it's a little intermixed because of how V4 and V6 networks can be bridged, but I think the simplification works fine here.

While it's possible there are lowered capabilities related to V6 surveillance, I would basically say it's a wash from a government surveillance perspective. The meta data capabilities don't change too much - it's possible that by snooping on multiple v4/v6 gateways you could get more data but if it's SSL (etc) wrapped they are going to be reliant on having the crypto compromised or the math that crypto relies on being compromised (and in many respects it is).

A decade ago I was implementing commercial (civilian) snooping capabilities (that worked across v4 and v6) that had long been sold to the government well before it hit the civilian space - I have no reason to believe that I was putting in the state of the art tech based on those systems - so I would say the capabilities have taken some significant leaps given the advanced in FPGA's, disk i/o, and memory speed.
posted by iamabot at 10:59 AM on November 23, 2016 [2 favorites]