-3

I NEVER SAID I WAS GOING TO DO THIS, I WAS JUST WONDERING IT IT WHERE POSSIBLE.

Address fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
Rule 1  fe80:0:0:0:202:b3ff:fe1e:8329
Rule 2  fe80::202:b3ff:fe1e:8329


ASCII       Dec                 Hex                 Oct
M:A:R:K     77:65:82:75         4D:41:52:4B         115:101:122:113
T:O:M:L:I:N 84:79:77:76:73:78   54:4F:4D:4C:49:4E   124:117:115:114:111:116

If I put in the ASCII above for an IPv6 address, would any of the following Dec, Hex, or Oct be the resultant translation, or would it simply fail? I think it would be kinda cool if it worked. Instead of going to google.com, you could type G:O:O:G:L:E and that would always bring you to google's website, even if the DNS root servers were being attacked. Google's DNS service could be G:O:O:G:D:N:S:1 and G:O:O:G:D:N:S:2 for their DNS servers that currently work on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I'm thinking about this because Anonymous said that they wanted to bring down the internet with this sort of attack.

So, is something like this possible? Would the ASCII I provided turn into an IPv6 address, and if it did, what IPv6 address would it turn into, the Dec, Hex, or Oct version?

Mark Tomlin
  • 650
  • 3
  • 10
  • 23
  • 3
    [RFC 4921](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4291#section-2.2) tells you how to represent an IPv6 address in ASCII. [RFC 5952](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5952) expands on that. What you describe is Bad, Wrong, Incompatible, and Duplicates the functionality of DNS. If you want to spell things out with IPv6 addresses you can try to get creative prefixes allocated using 0-9 and the letters A-F :-) – voretaq7 Jun 04 '12 at 17:52
  • I know it's bad, bad, bad. But I thought it was interesting question and one that I did not know the answer too. So I asked here. By the way, I never said that I was trying to do this, I just wanted to see if it was possible. Thank you for the RFCs. +1 to you. – Mark Tomlin Jun 04 '12 at 17:58

1 Answers1

4

There's a fancy system for this that has been around for a while. You might know it as DNS.

Jeff Ferland
  • 20,547
  • 2
  • 62
  • 85
  • I'm saying, should DNS servers not work, this could make an interesting backup solution. – Mark Tomlin Jun 04 '12 at 17:49
  • Yeah, but then you'd have to get your IP to be in whatever netblock matched which would either mean you're stuck to whoever happens to have that IP or Internet routing becomes the ultimate broken pile of spaghetti. – Jeff Ferland Jun 04 '12 at 17:51
  • I would think that a company like Google could make this work for them. They could buy a netblock could they not? – Mark Tomlin Jun 04 '12 at 17:53
  • I would like an IPv6 address that contains "DEAD:BEEF" or "DE1E:E7ED", or "C0FF:EE" (padded however you like)... – voretaq7 Jun 04 '12 at 18:01
  • Well, courtesy of the huge address blocks in IPv6, you can at least end with that. Otherwise, good luck getting the address block from IANA. – Jeff Ferland Jun 04 '12 at 18:07
  • 3
    Fun-fact: the public AAAA records of facebook.com all end in something like `face:b00c` – faker Jun 04 '12 at 18:11
  • @faker `host -t AAAA facebook.com` That's awesome! – Jeff Ferland Jun 04 '12 at 18:14