[ipv6hackers] Is there a telecom company which adpated IPv6 network on LTE?

Tore Anderson tore at fud.no
Thu Aug 15 15:21:22 CEST 2013


* Marco Ermini

> If you are in Europe or anyway outside of USA, it is very unlikely 
> you have a public IPv4 address on a mobile (cellular) network (be it 
> LTE or just 3G).
> 
> Even if it *appears* to be public, you are probably NATted anyway.
> 
> The reason is very easy, it's called overbilling and battery drowning
> attacks. In 3G networks (and on LTE networks which are still 
> supported by legacy infrastructure), your IP connectivity is a layer 
> on top of your mobile connection, and your PDP context (billing 
> record) is allocated when you are given an IP address, and you are 
> billed for the time you are "on line". If you are reachable via UDP, 
> an attacker can keep you on line more than you would like, and also 
> exhaust your battery. Therefore normally a mobile operator shields 
> you from being "so" reachable.

This varies from country to country actually. FWIW there's no tradition
in Norway for doing NAT in the mobile network. To avoid the overbilling
problem the operators instead have deployed a stateful firewall that
drops unsolicited inbound traffic. You can usually change the APN name
from "internet" to "internet.public" in order to accept unsolicited
inbound traffic though.

That said, NAT44 is coming nowadays (I understand the incumbent has
started doing it for all Apple devices already), but reason for this is
due to there not being enough IPv4 addresses to go around, and not for
any reasons related to security or billing.

Tore



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