Ipv6

The last two weeks have been a clustersuck of getting the dissertation finished, having to review, edit and rewrite the better pages here and there, hoping the stack of paper will be turned into a couple of decent hardbacks by the deadline. The working title is ‘Secure IPv6 Communications across Multiple Untrusted Networks‘ (comes with state of the art interactive CD-ROM). Considering the huge deal I made over this last year, it should have been much better.
When I first started thinking about the project a while back, the idea was a group of proxy servers with different IP addresses that would change every 24 hours or so, and a software client that would select the first available one. The central problem was how to communicate those proxy addresses to the clients without those addresses becoming known to whoever’s blocking them. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium creates technologies like that.
Things took another direction after coming across that SecuraBit interview with Sam Bowne on IPv6, then The Second Internet (Lawrence Hughes). All the pieces were there for secure communications system even better than what I originally thought up, and so IPv6 became the focus of the project. Somehow those huge address blocks and IPsec tunneling between hosts can be leveraged to defeat both censorship and surveillance. Probably forever.
About half way through, it was becoming apparent the solution is theoretically very simple, and the main component of my system would be a software client – installed on the Internet-enabled devices, it would handle everything from encryption, IPsec, address management and a couple of other things. It also turned out the system could be used for point-to-point (or P2P) communications and multicasting, so the plan shifted somewhat from defeating censorship in the existing client-server Internet. Actually creating a working product is another matter, as I’m not that technically gifted yet. Certainly not gifted enough to develop the GUI...