[p2p-research] IPv6 point-to-point tunneling: a major bonus for P2P developers

[marc fawzi]

Hi Michel,

Let me know if no one has blogged this, so I can go blog it on P2Pf.

~~

One of the hardest things (for a developer) making a new P2P application is
having to deal with the inexact science of TCP/IP NAT traversal (which works
only 50% of the time or less, depending on the NAT hardware), UDP hole
punching (which does not work with Symmetric NAT used by business users and
which leaves developers having to develop their own secure, reliable UDP
based protocol or isolate the transport code from open source,
application-specific UDP protocols like this
one<http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/DistributedTrackerAndDatabase>from
Azureus) or use UPnP (and the Mac OS X equavelant) which presents a
major secuirty risk to users. Skype, BitTorrent and all P2P apps that use a
direct PC-to-PC connection over the Internet have their own reliable, secure
UDP based transport.

I just realized today that with IPv6 there is built-in support for
point-to-point tunneling (via NAT) over TCP (which is already a reliable
protocol and can be used with SSL etc for securing communication) which
means it solves the P2P connectivity since all IPv6 networking hardware must
support it by default.

I know I may be late to catch up with this fact about IPv6, especially since
I (or rather my former team) spent quite a bit of time last year trying to
build reliable, secure UDP protocol for a P2P application), but I think that
by 2010 the US will have began to move to IPv6 on substantial scale.

~~
I am also wondering if there is some anti-P2P politics going on that are
hindering IPv6 adoption in the US, or it's just the expected inertia of
hundreds of millions (or billions) of IPv4 network nodes that would have to
be upgraded...

In any case, IPv6 would be a major boon to P2P application development.

Marc
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