Internet Standardization Targets Home as Data Center
With the advent of IPv6 and the growing number of devices and smart objects in the house, ordinary home networks will become data centers, with subnets for communication, TV, smart grid management, healthcare applications and more. How to make such networks easy for anyone to handle and secure was a major topic of the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Quebec last week. Nearly 300 engineers indicated interest in a soon-to-be-formed working group of the standardization body that will talk about the requirements.
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"IPv6 is the driving force behind this,” said Ericsson engineer Jari Arkko. The introduction of IPv6 is still proceeding slowly, said experts from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Cisco during the meeting, about the recent World IPv6 day. “End-users are the ones that are still missing in the IPv6 deployment picture,” Arkko said. One reason is slow adoption by ISPs, with some notable exceptions like French provider Free. It’s said to have the most v6-enabled customers, at 3.4 percent, compared to a general rate of 0.3 percent of users, according to Google figures.
Arkko said there will be an explosion of devices over the coming year and the simple IPv4-powered home networks will turn into complex networks with many subnets. His home network in Finland has grown to 11 subnets, he said, including special networks running under IPv4 and IPv6, networks reserved for the members of the family and one for visitors. He also experimented with smart objects like a scale that sent his weight wirelessly to a server, letting him “track weight over time,” Arkko said. His laundry machine even posts a message on Facebook when the laundry is dry.
Even as a geek, he saw problems like keeping track of the numbers and names of the devices in the network and security issues -- he certainly did not want to have his weight broadcast to everybody online. With public IPv6 addresses, users could get rid of network address translation between private addresses used in their home. “This provides a downside, too, because all those nasty people on the Internet might try to access your site,” Arkko said.
Chris Palmer, network engineer at Microsoft, acknowledged this is a problem for engineers to solve. “There is at the moment no definition of a local security boundary,” Palmer said. The solution is difficult because home network topologies vary a lot, he said: Rules for the various devices about who should be able to address them from the outside and if they should be allowed to only receive or also send data out to one or different receivers must be configured.
Cisco engineer Fred Baker, working on a document about the future multi-router environment, underlined there’s a need to make an easy “zero configuration.” He also pointed to the need for more people to have clearly separated LANs for working from a home office. How long this might take and if the zero configuration, plug-and-play solution is a possibility is hard to say, experts said. “It is a challenge,” Arkko said, “but I still thing it is possible.”