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A comment on IPv6 can boost mobile performance, battery life. Parent comment

Re:IPv6 can boost mobile performance, battery life by Aloisius on Friday January 11, 2013 @01:00PM (#5043963)
It seems incredibly unlikely that anyone is going to be able to do a active network scan of an address block to find devices with IPv6. Each end-user is granted a /64 network which has over 4 billion times the number of IPs than exist on the entire IPv4 internet.

Even with MAC-based IPv6 autoconfiguration to reduce the number of IPs you have to scan using tables of assigned vendor prefixes, you still have a truly massive number of IPs to scan before you find anyone.

Put another way, it would take over 500,000 years to just send an ICMPv6 packet to a /64 block (assuming you could even narrow it down to a /64 which itself seems just as unlikely) with a 1 Gbps connection (over ethernet).

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Re:IPv6 can boost mobile performance, battery life by agwa on Friday January 11, 2013 @01:09PM (#5044029)
If a mobile phone is given a /64 that means that entire /64 is routed to the phone, so any attempt to scan it (even if it doesn't find the actual address in use by the device) will cause battery drain.

But maybe attackers just won't even try.

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