EU agencies start moving to IPv6

EU security agency eats its own Ipv6 'dog food'.

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has announced will deliver its web site content over IPv6, the upgraded IP addressing protocol, making it the first European agency to do so.

ENISA's executive director Andrea Pirotti said that ENISA is actively supporting Europe's objective to widely implement IPv6 by 2010 with a view to " taking advantage of the technological features and resilience of the protocol."

The main reason for a company adopting the new standard is that IP addresses are running out under IPv4.

Four billion unique addresses can be generated under IPv4, which uses 32-bits to define an IP address. The new IPv6 protocol, which uses a 128-bit number space, allows unique IP addresses to be created for 3.4 x 10^38 devices. In fact, European research networking firm Dante, which manages the Géant2 multi-gigabit pan-European network, has calculated that IPv6 could distribute unique addresses to 600,000 billion, billion devices per square metre of the Earth's surface.

Warnings about the depletion of IPv4 addresses have traditionally been used to scare IT managers into moving to IPv6. However, the current problem for enterprise IT managers is how to justify a potentially expensive IPv6 rollout to CFOs, and how a joint IPv4/IPv6 infrastructure would be managed.

To offer its web content over IPv6, ENISA has deployed native IPv6 connectivity at its service providing network, it has also enabled Domain Name System (DNS) resolution and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol/Secure (HTTP/S) service delivery over IPv6.

IPv6 has other advantages over the current internet protocol standard, these include: a better header format to speed up the routing process, a design that can be extended easily to meet the requirements of emerging technologies or new applications, and security features that ensure confidentiality and integrity encryption of the data packets.