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ELI5: ipv6
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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Explain Like I'm Five
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IPv6 has several changes to the specification, but since this is ELI5:
When you were a child, your friends would call your house and a parent would answer the phone. They'd ask to talk to you, and your parents would hand the phone off to you. That might have been because you were too young to have a phone, but IPv4 with NAT works the same way because there are so many "houses" and only enough phone numbers for the houses, not all the people that live in them.
For IPv6 it's like your friends can call you directly on your cell phone. And they can call your brothers and sisters, your cat, your dog, your TV, your refrigerator, and the backyard squirrels. There are so many phone numbers that everyone can have their own.
I didn't know about that part, doesn't that make it necessary for everyone to have a firewall? What's stopping someone from port scaning my Chinese smart microwave and attack it?
This is getting out of ELI5 territory, but the way it works with IPv4 is when something on the internet needs to access your devices, it sends a request to your IP address (your house) along with a port number. Your router (that runs your firewall) decides if it should forward the request to the device inside your network. By default, it usually says "no" unless you tell it otherwise.
With IPv6, you'd still have a router, most likely, but it would be "watching" all of the IP addresses for your devices, not just a single one for your entire home.
This does add a fair bit of complexity, but my guess is that if we ever do start getting blocks of IPv6 addresses as home users, most routers will probably come with default firewall blocking rules pre-configured.
I’m on FiOS and I just had to turn on IPv6 on my router (it’s disabled by default on older Quantum Gateways). It works and they are assigning /56 blocks, I think it’s DHCPv6 but I haven’t looked in a while.