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The world in which IPv6 was a good design

apenwarr.ca

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Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#2
>One person at work put it best: "layers are only ever added, never removed."

Find this in the software world as well. Something about the java culture seems especially fascinated with multiple layers of abstraction.

Edit: Ok, some factions of the culture. "Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons"

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#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.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#4
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.

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

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#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

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#6
post #2

>One person at work put it best: "layers are only ever added, never removed." Find this in the software world as well. Something about the java culture seems especially fascinated with multiple layers of abstraction. Edit: Ok, some factions of the culture. " Convenient proxy factory bean superclass for proxy factory beans that create only singletons"

Computers don't understand concepts and people only do. Our gradual ascent from hardware to intuitively-usable mechanisms involves abstracting away the repeated "okay, given these primitives, here's how we'd use them" to go the next layer up.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#7
post #4
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.

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

Not even IP. Source/destinations would both only be crypto identifiers. The multiplexing part is just a convenient way of expressing different data streams to simpler protocols for QoS and other activities.

That does imply that there should be a way (possibly host to host, possibly build in to some kind of service resolution system) of looking up a 'name entry' and 'service type'.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#8
Part of the difficulty here - is you're not just upgrading the whole stack, you're instead layering on whatever stack is already there - its a needed part of deploying any new technology without replacing everything from the basement up. I'm not sure what this guy would do instead however - as someone with a decent networking background, I got completely lost in the end.

Re: The world in which IPv6 was a good design

#10
post #8

Part of the difficulty here - is you're not just upgrading the whole stack, you're instead layering on whatever stack is already there - its a needed part of deploying any new technology without replacing everything from the basement up. I'm not sure what this guy would do instead however - as someone with a decent networking background, I got completely lost in the end.

Maybe you should read it again and let us know which of those options it is.
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