3 ms·
Scanning 2^32 wasn’t exactly viable 30 years ago, so never say never.
by hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Scanning 2^32 wasn’t exactly viable 30 years ago, so never say never.
- jerf 5y agoYes, people often say this about IPv6 thinking they're being clever. It's not. 2^128 is big, relative to the universe itself. It is an accident of history that computing spent so much time at binary orders of magnitude that technology could catch up and make the previous limits seem small. At some point, the exponential curve takes off and no amount of physical resources can catch up to it, because our universe taps out at O(n^3). 2^128 is pretty much on the other side of that takeoff point. You can almost catch up to it... at the cost of the resources of an entire galaxy... or more. (Technically it's even sooner than O(n^3) if you also have to avoid black holes, but since the relevant comparison here is "exponential" the details hardly matter here.)
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoFair point, I just did the math and even with a botnet of 13m (pulled from googling ‘largest botnet’) it’d still take e+22 years, give or take a few billion. Still, network address obfuscation really shouldn’t be a security control.