Clever idea. Begs the question of why you would use http if you already have a bidirectional webRTC connection, but I guess it depends on the application.
Provide a server on-prem at the customer, but allow them a hybrid access to the system.
Via cloud when necessary, "local" (by WebRTC) when possible.
While we could just open a local port, using the cloud to arbitrate gives us a common product vision, and proper authN/authZ.
Also allows us to pull the latency down to single digit milliseconds. The regional relays are double digit. When we use relays that aren't regional it's a couple hundred.
I suppose the persistence of IPv4 has broken all of our brains, but with IPv6 you can just Not Have NAT, and just have normal end-to-end connectivity to any random box in your home from outside.
IPv6 can get rid of NAT which is one of the most annoying hurdles. It unlocks the type of use case where technical people can host something from home for fun, although many can’t access it because both parties need ipv6.
But if you set your sights higher and want to build true p2p apps for non-techies, or if you want “roaming” servers (say an FTP server on your laptop), there are more obstacles than NAT, in practice:
- Opening up ports in both a residential router and sometimes the OS or 3p firewall. Most people don’t know what a port is.
- DNS & certs which require a domain name and a fixed connection (if the peer moves around across networks, eg a laptop or phone, DNS is not responsive enough)
> IPv6 can get rid of NAT which is one of the most annoying hurdles.
Right.
> It unlocks the type of use case where technical people can host something from home for fun, although many can’t access it because both parties need ipv6.
At this point, that's an obstacle, but at some future point hopefully IPv6 will hit a critical mass and network effects will take off because there'll be enough stuff that _doesn't work without IPv6_, so customers will demand it.
> if you set your sights higher and want to build true p2p apps for non-techies
Definitely.
Restoring the universal endpoint-to-endpoint connectivity on the IP network overcomes a _major hurdle_, a hurdle that's so big and longstanding that people have come to just assume its existence and fear and removal… but it certainly doesn't solve all the problems.
> or if you want “roaming” servers (say an FTP server on your laptop)
> - Opening up ports in both a residential router and sometimes the OS or 3p firewall. Most people don’t know what a port is.
I mean, UPnP makes big improvements in this area, but a lot of devices stupidly don't handle it, or block it for alleged security reasons. Frustrating.
> - DNS & certs which require a domain name and a fixed connection (if the peer moves around across networks, eg a laptop or phone, DNS is not responsive enough)
There's no real reason why TLS clients _must_ only trust certs when they see that the CN or SAN matches the _domain name_ through which they looked up the IP address. I think that with a better issuing infrastructure and UX, a TOFU-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_on_first_use) approach to self-signed certs for peer-to-peer services could be both comprehensible for non-techies and highly secure.
Would you be willing to share a few details on how you do this. And how do you prevent someone spamming your devices or is the risk so low you don't care?
Unfortunately most ISP's in my area don't dish out IPv6 addresses without ridiculous monthly charges. I hope one day it becomes more commonplace.
> Unfortunately most ISP's in my area don't dish out IPv6 addresses without ridiculous monthly charges
If you've got an IPv4 address that responds to ICMP, HE's https://tunnelbroker.net/ offers free IPv6 ranges (a bunch of /64s and a /48) for free. You can configure a tunnel to work through many routers, but with some setup you could also have something like a Raspberry Pi announce itself as an IPv6 router.
Sites like Netflix treat HE tunnels as VPNs, though, so if you run into weird playback errors, consider configuring your device's DNS server/network not to use IPv6 for that.
As for your questions:
> how you do this
Open port 8888 to (prefix):abcd:ef01:2345:56, or whatever IP your device obtains, in your firewall. It's the same process as with IPv4, except you can use the same port on multiple devices.
> And how do you prevent someone spamming your devices or is the risk so low you don't care?
While some services have started scanning IPv6, a home network from a semi-competent ISP will contain _at least_ 2^64 IPv6 addresses. Scanning the entire IPv6 network is unfeasible for most automated scanners.
You just plug a device into your network. The device acquires an address. You can type that address into another device on the Internet to attempt a connection to your device. If your device is running a web server that allows access from the whole Internet, this brings up the home page. If you have a firewall, tell the firewall to enable connections to that web server from the whole internet.
What do you mean by spamming? People are scanning the Internet the whole time to see what's there, and it isn't a threat unless you are doing something terribly insecure. Scanning IPv6 is impossible in practice anyway, due to the high number of available addresses.
Thanks for your response. Spamming was a poor choice of words on my part. I really meant DDos or just generally people sending erroneous requests or being a nuisance wasting data/resources once they know the address, say if it was leaked.
> There's something nice about being anonymous behind a communal v4 gateway.
IPv6 lets you do this -- nearly every client will use privacy addressing, so your (default) source address rotates daily. However you can still connect to the machine on its main (non-privacy protected) IPv6 address.
Tangentially, these “privacy” addresses are such an ipv6-ism of small theoretical value at the expense of extra complexity and noise. If ipv6 had been “ipv4 but now with 100% more bits”, I suspect we would have come a lot further in global deployments.
IPv6 literally is that, plus a few pretty minor changes.
SLAAC? Literally a hack that accidentally caught on because some vendor implemented it sooner than DHCPv6 for some reason. It was intended that everyone would use DHCP just like before. And that's the biggest difference from v4 other than the address format.
They might sound minor but in practice they violate assumptions that are really crucial for implementations. Everyone who deals with addresses must make decisions about how and what to do in face of these quirks.
Another example is the zone identifier string. So how do you store them efficiently in memory or a db? Golang did a really clever thing with netip but the implementation was not easy. Oh well maybe we can always ignore and strip it? Maybe, depends on the use case.
The point is going from exactly 32 bit to 128 bit + sometimes maybe a variable length string (max length, encoding, allowed chars?) is not a small change for something so important and ubiquitous as ip.
In most cases, you don't. Zone identifiers are OS-specific, contain whatever the OS says they do, and may be only valid in the short term (e.g. Linux interface number). You only need them if you are doing lower level networking things. As a web app you just don't, because they aren't part of an internet address. As a web browser you pass whatever the user typed through to the operating system.
Okay, but that's not a minor change. Regardless of why it caught on, SLAAC completely changes how addresses are handed out, and is in many/most environments a requirement if for no other reason than that Android explicitly refuses to implement DHCPv6 ( https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085 ). And once SLAAC is in play, suddenly privacy problems come up and you kind of need to jump through the extra hoops to avoid, y'know, putting your MAC address in every single packet you send over the public internet.
> SLAAC? Literally a hack that accidentally caught on because some vendor implemented it sooner than DHCPv6 for some reason.
The history I recall is very much a academics designing theoretical standards vs operators who actually implement the damn things.
The academics designed the standards around the use of SLAAC deliberately and intentionally. DHCPv6 was the ‘hack’ that operators implemented after the fact.
I’m sure there’s an RFC somewhere that’ll prove this one way or another, if anyone else reading this cares enough to determine for sure (Duty Calls).
With ipv6 you can match IPs realistically to a single household across multiple sites.
Access porn.com from 12.34.56.78 and you are one of dozens of households. Just because Bob Bobson who logged into Netflix is on the same IP it doesn’t mean that house was on porn.com.
Access from 2100:1234:5678:abcd:: and you are accessing from one specific household, even if the lower 64 bits differ. You’ll likely keep the same ip for longer than in cgnat anyway (and by design you keep it until your isp changes)
I think they mean CGNAT. My mobile phone connection goes through CGNAT so it's impossible to identify my individual phone by its IPv4 address, whereas my home address uniquely identifies my home, at least for a limited period of time. Sometimes this is good and sometimes this is bad. Sometimes you want to be anonymous and sometimes you want to be delineated from the people who are being anonymous.
I don't think that's possible without a jump server. If all peers are NATed, there is no way doing p2p without a jump server. WebRTC is a giant rabbit hole itself.
