(24 August 2007 8:00 pm)

NEW DELHI: The government of India is proactively pushing for users of the Internet space to migrate towards the Internet Protocol Version 6.

The government users have been mandated to migrate and there should be major transition over the next two or three years.

For dealing with cyber crime, the government is setting up a centre to develop Cyber Forensic Tools. Its Digital Forensic unit is already functional, but there is need for research and development and cooperation from players like Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).

Addressing the workshop on 'Internet and Issues Impacting Policy in the Convergence Environment', Gulshan Rai, senior official in the Ministry of Communication and Information technology, said that the government has set up a 10 GB core with a one GB service line up for pushing IPV6.

The workshop was organised jointly by Internet And Mobile Association of India and Icann.

Rai informed also that the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill 2006 is ready and will expectedly be through in the coming session of Parliament.

Rai was speaking after Icann president and CEO Paul Twomey and its advisory body chairperson Steeve Crocker echoed that the need is to migrate to the IPV6 as early as possible.

Rai, who said that of late there has been a massive proliferation of attacks on Indian sites, as many as 109 in the past seven or eight months, admitted that the same BOTs (an open-source EDI / b2b software) that had been used last year to launch the Estonian attack, had been used in India.

Rai said that sectoral CERTs (Computer Emergency Response Team) have been set up to deal with Reserve Bank of India, railways, civilian aviation, power, telecom and other sensitive sectors.

He said that no Indian government site has been hacked so far, looking at the growing number of infringements on Indian sites and an Estonian level capability of the attackers, "anything is possible."

He said that data shows that most of the attacks on Indian sites has been launched so far from the US, China and Taiwan, but admitted that during his discussions with Crocker and Twomey, it had become clear that though the attacks may have been launched from another country, they were routed through servers in the US.

In his presentation, Twomey explained that the dire need of the hour is to shift to IPV6. He said that under the IPV4 regime, there are more than four billion sites, and the space is running out fast, especially those for the top level domain names (TLDNs).

"I am not saying that the space will be over just now, and besides, those domains operating on IPV4 would still be operational, but the days are numbered.

Contrarily, IPV6 has been developed to accommodate 340 trillion IP addresses and that is the path now open, especially for TLDN seekers.

Ccocker said that one way that hackers 'cheat' users is that they send the 'packets of information' through one path but mask the return path, and said that it was extremely easy to hack a site, unless serious measures are taken.

He said also that it is a chicken-and-egg problem: SPs are saying that the users are not asking for IPV6 and users are saying it is not available. Hence, to crack the situation, Crocker suggested that content providers must step in.