Emile Aben

6to4 - How Bad is it Really?

Emile Aben
Contributors: Tore Anderson

6 min read

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At the recent RIPE 61 meeting in Rome and at earlier meetings, we heard that connectivity over 6to4 is not very dependable, which hampers IPv6 deployment. I wondered how bad it really is and started measuring it. This article describes what I measured and shows the results. Spoiler: It's pretty bad.


Introduction

In the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the preferred solutions for network endpoints is to have both, native IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity (i.e. dual-stack). If a site cannot get native IPv6 connectivity, the IPv4 network endpoints can chose from a number of conversion technologies to connect to the IPv6 Internet. Our IPv6 measurements at end-users and DNS resolvers suggest that the most commonly used conversion technologies are: 6to4 , Teredo , and tunnel-brokers . At RIPE 61 and previous RIPE meetings we heard that 6to4 connectivity is quite often broken. We were interested to find out how broken it really is.

Measurement Results

In Figure 1 below you can see the percentage of 6to4 connections to dual-stack and IPv6-only objects on our measurement webserver that fail, binned per day. See footnote [1] for the methodology of these measurements.

 

6to4 Failure rate over time

Figure 1: Failure rate of 6to4 connections over time

As our measurements only count failures on the return path (as we cannot see packets that don't arrive at our measurement machine), the real failure rate will be even higher. As you can see from the graph, the failure rate we measured is quite significant (around 15%). A weekday-weekend pattern is also clearly visible.

Day Failure rate
Monday 15.5%
Tuesday 14.7%
Wednesday 18.6%
Thursday 16.3%
Friday 20.0%
Saturday 9.2%
Sunday 9.8%

Table 1: Failure rate of 6to4 connections per weekday

In Table 1 we zoomed in to the weekday-weekend pattern, which shows a failure rate on weekdays of 15-20%, whereas in the weekend it drops down to a little under 10%. This drop in the weekend could be caused by lower Internet use from corporate sites during the weekend. We expect corporate sites to do more filtering on 6to4 packets (by corporate 'stateful' firewalls) on the return-path.

Table 2 shows a categorisation of the types of 6to4 nodes that try to connect to our measurement site and the associated failure rates. This categorisation is based on the last 64 bits of the IPv6 address. The table shows that 6to4 implementations that use the embedded IPv4 address as the last 32 bits of the IPv6 address (e.g. 2002:a:1::a:1) are the major part of 6to4 connections we see, and also have the highest failure rate. Close to 15% of failures we see is likely due to the rogue RA-problem that is described in Tore Anderson's RIPE 61 presentation .

6to4 Node Type Failure rate Likely Cause
EUI64 (7.4% of connections) 4.7% (rogue) RA
Privacy extentions (8.1% of connections) 9.7% (rogue) RA
Embedded IPv4 repeated in last 32 bits (84.4% of connections) 15.8% Machine local 6to4 (likely Windows)
2002:XXXX:XXXX:1::1 (0.18% of connections) 29.3% Machine local 6to4 (likely Mac OS X)

Table 2: 6to4 failure rates per 6to4 node type

Conclusion

The 6to4-brokenness we measured is quite significant, as all stories about 6to4 already indicated, so the "6to4 must die"-sentiment we picked up during the RIPE 61 meeting is understandable.

Content providers will not be affected much by the 6to4 breakage we see, as long as operating systems and applications prefer native IPv4 over auto-tunneled IPv6 (6to4,Teredo) by default, and as long as they prefer native IPv6 over everything else. Luckily, with the latest fix to Mac OS X (10.6.5), all major operating systems behave the way it is described above. As Mac OS users upgrade to 10.6.5 or newer, there is hope that overzealous use of 6to4 by end users will eventually cease to be a major concern for content providers that want to go dual-stack . Keep an eye on Tore's breakage stats .

With the free IPv4 address pool depleting, we expect IPv6-only content to appear in the near future. For these content providers the situation is not pretty. IPv4-only users that want to reach their content will have to face the significant 6to4 breakage we measured.

For hardware vendors it makes a lot of sense to make products not enable 6to4 by default , otherwise users of their products will have to face 6to4 breakage by default.

How much access providers and end-users will feel the 6to4 breakage depends on the situation. Using the latest versions of operating systems, the effect should be minimal as long as the content is IPv4-only or dual-stack. For IPv6-only content it really matters if the access provider is IPv4-only or dual-stack. If the access provider has not upgraded to dual-stack yet, its IPv4-only customers will have to use a technology like 6to4, and face breakage. This may cause customers to switch provider (which paradoxically will help IPv6 deployment).

Moral of the story: Go dual-stack. Now.

Footnote:

[1] Methodology: A description of the measurement setup can be found in this earlier RIPE Labs article: Measuring IPv6 at Web Clients and Caching Resolvers (Part 3: Methodology) . The measurements are made to objects that are either available over IPv4-only,  dual-stack, and IPv6-only. On 11 May 2010 we started to keep tcpdump-trace files of traffic to and from 2002::/16. From these traces we determined the number of 6to4 connection attempts by looking for TCP SYN packets. We view a connection as successful if we see at least 1 data packet in the connection, i.e. a packet without SYN-flags. For our measurement setup we are not running a 6to4 relay ourselves, but rely on upstream providers to provide 6to4 for the return-path. We've seen traceroutes to 2002::1 from our measurement machine land in Surfnet's network, and we have not seen signs of outages in their 6to4-service in our measurements. So not running a 6to4 relay ourselves should not affect these measurements significantly.

 

 

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About the author

Emile Aben Based in Amsterdam, NL

I'm a system architect/research coordinator at the RIPE NCC, where I work in the science group. I'm a chemist by training, but have been working since 1998 on Internet related things, as a sysadmin, security consultant, web developer and researcher. I am interested in technology changes (like IPv6 deployment), Internet measurement, data analysis, data visualisation, sustainability and security. I'd like to bring research and operations closer together, ie. do research that is operationally relevant. When I'm not working I like to make music (electric guitar, bass and drums), do sports (swimming, (inline) skating, bouldering, soccer), and try to be a good parent.

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