Comment by TheusHen 4 days ago
Author here.
This article focuses on the transport-layer design, not a torrent client replacement. The goal is to provide a reusable IPv6-native P2P connection layer (QUIC-based, NAT-free) that existing clients or new applications can integrate without touching their higher-level logic.
Feedback on design trade-offs is very welcome.
Thanks for sharing. I want to ask you something: I understand that with IPv6 the idea is that every household receives several of IPv6 addresses so that every single IoT device has their unique IPv6 address and there is no NAT needed.
Would it be possible to use a dozen of IPv6 addresses at the same time? Like send one UDP packet over certain IPv6 interface, next packet over another IPv6 interface, and so on. If both sending and receiving end have access to multiple IPv6 addresses I can see how this significantly increases complexity for tracking.
Could you split up the traffic across dozens or hundreds of IPv6 source addresses?
> Could you split up the traffic across dozens or hundreds of IPv6 source addresses?
Yes
> I can see how this significantly increases complexity for tracking
Not really. You just track at some prefix level. In general, the ISP will hand out a /64 per consumer so that's what you can track. From there, you can build more complex and more precise grouping rules for tracking.
If you assign a subnet to a host, or allow the host to claim multiple addresses via ND from the link subnet, then you can use as many addresses as you want. You could give every process on your machine its own IPv6 address for example.
Yes, and if your host has access to several IPv6 addresses and maybe an IPv4 address it'd be nice to have something like wireguard actually utilize all of them in some random order. Same on the receiving end, wireguard server listenes both on IPv4 and IPv6 at same time and internally puts received packets in the proper order.
I feel this would create significant struggles for any surveillance software because most firewalls I know are modeled on a source address / target address basis.
If you have access to enough source IPv6 addresses you might even put your whole wireguard traffic into ICMP packet payload?
The biggest tracking hurdle is to figure out if the ISP that handed out the block of addresses is handing out /64s, /56s, or /48s. The network provided to you is functionally the same as the IP address assigned to you with IPv4.
In theory I could rent an IPv4 /29 (of which 6 addresses are usable) for like 20 euros a month from my home ISP to cause the same confusion but I doubt it'd confuse trackers to use those.
I thought most ISP's give out at least /64's for free these days? Telia gives out a /56, although unfortunately there's no way to migrate them. This was a big deal for my homelab when I was moving, as I had to manually update all prefixes everywhere. A pain in the ass.
By convention they're supposed to DHCP you at least a /64 if not something wider. I don't believe there's any expectation it be static (although it typically is AFAIK) and there are some providers that defy expectations by handing out narrower slices (up to and including /128).
yes - this is also part of the privacy extensions spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941
That's merely convention. I've encountered at least one VPS provider handing out /128's.
It is more than convention, the /64 is the minimum allocation to support SLAAC. If you're getting less than a /64 you're not getting full support for IPv6.
Well you're not getting support for SLAAC but I didn't understand that to be a core requirement to qualify as a functional IPv6 implementation.
Regardless, my point is that allocations narrower than /64 exist in the wild for better or worse. So do IPv6 NAT implementations for that matter. If you assume either of those things don't exist then you might be in for a surprise.
Networks are supposed to do egress filtering to prevent any packets with fake IPs from ever leaving the network. In practice it's not always so, but it mostly is. So you'd be limited to fake IP addresses in your own network, and doing so might raise alerts depending on the network infrastructure you live in.
Packets with fake source address can easily be spotted, and will raise an alert. In terms of using multiple interfaces for a single service it might be easy to hack together in a python script, but last time I checked the linux kernel support for bundling multiple interfaces is limited to redundancy and failover.
What I'd like to have is a single service dynamically using many network interfaces with randomized packet timings and randomized packet scheduling (5 packets on first interface, pause on 2nd, some on third interface, sometimes send traffic simultaneously).
> QUIC-based, NAT-free
I realize it's intended to be an unsupported edge case but I'm curious. What happens in the event a NAT is present along the IPv6 network path? Do you just forward a port the same as you would with the various IPv4 solutions and move on? Or does it break catastrophically? Something else?
https://github.com/TheusHen says you're 14 years old.
The project is very impressive, as is https://github.com/TheusHen/ternary-ibex and having papers: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5055-5884
What's the education path for a 14 year old that does this stuff?