World IPv6 Day draws attention to security issues with new protocol

The marking of World IPv6 Day June 8 has drawn fresh attention to the next generation Internet addressing protocol, as well as to the security considerations that enterprises will need to deal with as they migrate to it.

IPv6 is an IP address standard that is designed to replace the current IPv4 protocol, which has been in use since the 1980s for routing Internet traffic. The new protocol has been available for several years now and supports several magnitudes more address spaces than IPv4, while also enabling better security and reliability. Even so, few companies have upgraded to it because of the perceived complexity in doing so. That is expected to start quickly changing though because the IPv4 protocol has almost run out of unique IP addresses for all the Web sites, computers and other devices that are connecting to the Internet on a daily basis.