[Product Update] Internet Protocol v6 Prepares the Web for Smart Things - Bitdefender BOX now includes support for IPv6

The internet does not seem crowded, but it is. Not with its 4.3 billion users. It’s crowded with devices, because that’s what the virtual space is made of. And it gets more crowded with each gadget you hook online.

More systems than human beings are connected to the internet. According to some estimates, more than 26 billion devices have online access. The number of connected gadgets a person uses varies by country, but Cisco in 2017 cited an average of eight per person in the US and 5.4 in Western Europe.

If the numbers seem inflated, just count how many you have. Make sure you add the smart appliances, mobile phones, computers and mini-computers, routers, tablets, smart watches, digital assistants, GPS systems, IP cameras and accompanying surveillance equipment, home alarms, doorbells, coffee makers, cars, smart lights, clocks, toys, gaming consoles, or thermostats.

And this growth will continue, fueled by coming technologies providing faster, more reliable communication standards, such as 5G mobile networking, to be supported in the next generation of IoT.

Why is this important? Because every device that can connect to the internet needs to communicate with other gadgets to fulfill its functionality. To exchange messages with one another online, they need the Internet Protocol (IP), which delivers them based on an address.

For decades, version 4 of the Internet Protocol has dominated the rapidly expanding online world. It has an address space of 4.3 million addresses, though, too few for today’s demands, even if most devices sit on a local network and use a local IP address given by the home router that allows web connectivity.

A new protocol version, IPv6, was deployed in 2012, offering far more addresses than its predecessor. To get an idea, the number of addresses is so vast that it is easier to define it mathematically: 3.4×10³⁸. Confused? Here’s a translation of it: about 340 undecillion, or around 340 billion billion billion billion addresses.

Besides solving the address space problem and allowing for an internet with more devices, IPv6 comes with other advantages, such as better security, easier configuration and simpler processing. To handle IPv6 traffic, a device needs to support it at the operating system level, and this does not happen with all IoT.

Bitdefender BOX now includes support for IPv6 so it can function with Internet Service Providers that offer this type of connectivity. Thus, it can communicate with devices that support this protocol (you can check here if you have an IPv6 address on various devices). Simply put, Bitdefender’s network-level security solution is ready for the future.

Before enabling IPv6 on Bitdefender BOX, make sure you check this page that explains what you need to know, and see this one, to check that IPv6 is working. If you experience problems after activating IPv6 on Bitdefender BOX, check this support article.

Image credit: geralt