Live data from Hacker News

The world in which IPv6 was a good design

apenwarr.ca

31–40 of 199 posts

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#31
The "Internet Mobile Host Protocol" (IMHP) was written as a draft RFC in 1994. As far as I know it was never adopted, but is it still relevant, even as an inspiration for IPv6?

[1] https://www.cs.rice.edu/~dbj/pubs/draft-johnson-imhp-00.txt

Edit: Its official entry at the IETF: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-johnson-imhp/

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#32
post #22
post #18

What he's really arguing for is a circuit-switched network, so that connections can be persistent over moves. He just needs a unique connection ID. One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. If you could move an HTTP connection from one IP address to another on the fly, it could be…

> One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. As a network-ignoramus, who likes cryptography, I’ve long dreamt of a networking protocol where endpoints are defined, primarily, by a public key. All messages would be encrypted with the destination public key, and signed by the source p…

Have you looked at WireGuard? It uses public keys to identify endpoints, although it doesn't solve the fake source address of the VPN protocol packets itself. I don't think that's possible to support at the same time as NAT and moving across Internet connections (changing IPs as you move across Wifi/Cellular etc).

https://www.wireguard.com

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#33
post #29

"If, instead, we had identified sessions using only layer 4 data, then mobile IP would have worked perfectly." Mobile IP can still work with the current infrastructure -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IP This proposal was basically a service which would host a static IP for you (similar to the LTE structure but with IP underneath instead of L2), and forward to whatever your "real" IP was using IP-in-IP encapsu…

That's basically just an IPIP tunnel. It works, but adds tons of latency. A "good" mobile IP (which would be possible with eg. QUIC) would add no per-packet latency.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#34
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop the idea of ports too. Every program gets its own IP Mentioning ideas like that at work get queer looks about how it'd be impossible to configure a firewall at that point But keep going further. End up with 128 bit CPU where every byte is IP addressable. Necessary security to block random outsiders from reading your memory, but capable of potentially running various parts remotely transparently

Just treat the port as an extension of the binary address space of the IP address. No need to "drop" ports otherwise.

But that breaks the layering (where reachability is provided by l3 and transport by l4). Now existing internetwork routers cannot handle your new 144-bit address format.

The folks at IETF meetings are doing a wonderful job trying to keep existing tech working. That's why you always extend old standards and rarely deprecate anything. Just look at BGP, for example.

We, the application software programmers on layers 5 through 7 with the "move fast and break things" attitude, could not ever have designed anything like the internet and keep it running as long as our current one has been.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that actually IPv6 already includes all the complexity you're talking about: complicated multicast to replace complicated broadcast, complicated routing to replace complicated bridging. The underlying problem with IPv6 is that it includes all this complexity because they expected to have to replace layer 2 bridging. But this never happened, so now we have all those features twice, which is worse.

So IPv6 in essence is the future that was stillborn - we still plan and develop our networks for an IPv4 world, and then run IPv6 on top of them, correct?

It seems so to me. But someday, years from now, the investment might still pay off. In the meantime it's just pain.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#37
post #5
post #3

Ok, so QUIC or some other common layer 4/4+5 'Modern TCP over UDP for network compatibility' solution. Lets just throw away the concept of 'addresses' for authentication and actually use a cryptographic authentication identifier of somekind, combined with some mux iteration ID.

Check out ZeroTier It implements a virtual ethernet layer using cryptographic identities underneath. Here's the relevant section on the address computation from the manual: https://www.zerotier.com/manual.shtml#2_1_2

This seems really complicated. Is ZeroTier closer to an cjdns- / i2p-style system, or is it closer to CurveCP/MinimaLT/QUIC? (QUIC being the odd one out of the trio as it grafts on some awful HTTP semantics, but that's Google for you.)

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#38
I just read in New Scientist mag that the Internet was developed to survive a nuclear attack. I recall reading somewhere that one of the original inventors has stated that the issue never came up. I can't find the exact quote, could anyone here help me out.

ppps: OK, found it, "the creation of the ARPANET was not motivated by considerations of war", Robert Taylor 2004

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d77k7j/dear-inter...

ref: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531383-300-we-can-s...

ps: Is IPV6 a bit like a camel, as in, a camel is a horse designed by committee :)

pps: This has to be the only forum on the Internet where you get modded down for a) asking a question and b) making a joke. I didn't figure my comment could trigger any camels, committees or horses reading this.

https://www.newscientist.com/

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#39
post #22
post #18

What he's really arguing for is a circuit-switched network, so that connections can be persistent over moves. He just needs a unique connection ID. One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. If you could move an HTTP connection from one IP address to another on the fly, it could be…

> One amusing possibility would be to do this at the HTTPS layer. With HTTPS Everywhere, most HTTP connections now have a unique connection ID at the crypto layer - the session key. As a network-ignoramus, who likes cryptography, I’ve long dreamt of a networking protocol where endpoints are defined, primarily, by a public key. All messages would be encrypted with the destination public key, and signed by the source p…

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
Post reply on HN