The explosive growth of the Internet was facilitated in part by the standardization of IPv4, the protocol that allowed the provisioning of around 4 billion unique addresses. Today, we’ve run out of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 represents the modern Internet where billions of devices including phones, tablets, cars, household appliances and a slew of IoT devices need to interact on a global scale.
As more network service providers and platforms transition to IPv6-only network services, businesses are forced to make the transition. Cloudflare IPv6 support makes your migration as smooth and painless as possible.
At Cloudflare we’ve offered full IPv6 support as well as our IPv6-to-IPv4 gateway since 2012. Enabling IPv6 support is as simple as enabling IPv6 Compatibility in the dashboard.
Cloudflare’s Automatic IPv6 Gateway allows IPv4-only websites to support IPv6-only clients with no additional configuration. No hardware. No software. No code changes. And no need to change your hosting provider.
Legacy services that require IPv4 support can take advantage of our Pseudo IPv4 service. Pseudo IPv4 works by adding an HTTP header to requests established over IPv6 with a “pseudo” IPv4 address. Using a hashing algorithm, Pseudo IPv4 will create a Class E IPv4 address which will always produce the same output for the same input; the same IPv6 address will always result in the same Pseudo IPv4 address.
End-to-end security is built into the core of IPv6 with IPSec as a major protocol requirement. IPSec is a security framework that contains a suite of cryptographic protocols including Authentication Header (AH) protocol, Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) protocol and Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol. IPSec provides network-level security which means that any application sending/receiving data over the Internet will have its data encapsulated within the IPv6 packet.
To compliment IPv6 security, Cloudflare offers a slew of security features including a robust Web Application Firewall to protect against vulnerabilities like SQL injections, cross-site script attacks, and zero-day threats. Cloudflare technology automatically detects new attacks and starts to block an attack for both the particular website and the entire community. Since Cloudflare continually learns, every site, regardless of size, makes the system smarter.
Mobile support is mandatory in IPv6 with the implementation of Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). Route optimization is a built in feature, and Neighbor Discovery (NDP) and Address Auto-configuration allow devices to function in any location, improving roaming capabilities by enabling mobile nodes to change their point-of-attachment without changing their IP address. Real User Measurement studies conducted by some of the Internet’s most popular websites show IPv6 made their sites 10-15 percent faster.
The Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol significantly reduces your vulnerabilities to man-in-the-middle attacks by ensuring the sender of an NDP message is the owner of the claimed address.
To further enhance your visitor’s mobile experience, Cloudflare caches your assets across an expansive global content delivery network reducing load times by bringing your content closer to your visitors. With technologies like Mirage image optimization, which accelerates the delivery of content to mobile devices by determining the type of device and connection speed, on average, a website on Cloudflare loads 2x as fast and uses 60% less bandwidth.
Cloudflare has helped nearly one million websites join the modern web, making us one of the fastest growing providers of IPv6 web connectivity on the Internet. Our global network has deflected some of the largest DDoS attacks, providing unparalleled security and reliability for our customers and their online assets.
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