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DARPA Aims to Redo the Internet Protocol
Xaleth Nuada writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) is looking to redo the entire Internet Protocol. With the DoD increasingly adopting network-centric warfare the shortcomings in the current IP have become resoundingly clear. Everything works fine for static hardwired networks. But not for dynamic wireless ones. The benefits for your average geek? How about REAL wireless networking? Easier network set-up? Increased wireless security protocol? Increased reliability in sending information?" Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles. :)
Im a former Marine myself, and I fondly remember what a nightmare it was just trying to get everyone to have the same crypto loads for existing voice communications hardware. Im really curious as to how they propose to keep the network secure. On the other hand, the possible benifits are huge. Distributed sensor networks in particular could be revolutionized by this.
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
It seems more likely that DARPA would create a protocol free from built-in snooping for fear that such a feature could be used by the enemy.
While governments in general are guided by the will-to-power, militaries (at least the US military) are fairly well driven by readiness and victory. It doesn't seem likely that they would create such a vulnerable technology.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't some effort made to embed snooping and tracing into all packets transmitted.
If the purpose of this redesign is to better allow the armed forces to communicate on the battlefield, I highly doubt that they will embed snooping and tracing into the protocol. The military takes great pains to ensure that thier communications are kept secure, and having a secret backdoor in their entire communication system (no matter who controls it) is not something they would tolerate.
Please, anything that's not encumbered by *anybody's* IP patents.
It is in the DoD's self interest to make a communications protocol be as resilient and secure as humanly possible. Secure and reliable communications are the cornerstone of the modern military. A built-in insecurity in a comm system can and will be exploited by an adversary just as readily (if not more so) as an unintentional one.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
SMTP is not a transport-layer protocol. TCP and UDP are the most common transport-layer protocols that ride over IP - although many others exist.
There are certainly some valid arguments for looking at other transport protocols (the lack of mobility features in TCP/UDP, for instance), but SMTP is not one of them since it's an application-layer protocol.
DARPA invented the Internet Protocol before, and within a few decades the technology was widely deployed. Unfortunately, this time around, things won't be so easy.
Before, it was competing against a vacuum. Now, it's competing against ubiquitous IP. They may develop some cool stuff that works on a battlefield, but it will never get widespread usage, commoditization, and economy of scale that IP has. If they come up with new features that work great, somebody will find a way to get similar functionality built on top of good old IP.
IP isn't perfect, but it's good enough that there's no way to displace it, given its free nature and level of entrenchment=.
Easier activity tracing, easier monitoring, easing censorship of "bad" websites, easier disabling of internet access to undesirables.
That gives as much as it takes. If it's harder to by anonymous online, then that also means it's going to be easier to locate and disable the access of spammers and pedophiles.
Accountability tools are very good things when properly applied. The hard part is making sure they're not abused.
we must absolutely have some mechanism for assigning network capabilities to different users
Sorry, but the network capability of running a web server hasn't been assigned to you. You are blocked at the protocol layer.
Sounds like they don't want the Internet to be a network of ends anymore and control who can do what with the network. Nice experiment, this unrestricted free speech on the Internet, but we've decided we don't want you to have that. Be consumers, not producers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
TCP works poorly in a wireless environment because of the congestion control. When packets get lost, it assumes it's because of congestion and starts backing off, which slows down the connection even more. That's not always the case in wireless because packets can get lost due to interference and a number of other scenarios that do not exist for wired connections.
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The article seems to have two different main points. Firstly that the entire networking model (7 layers) is inappropriate for "reliable" networks. Secondly they suggest that the entire model for building computers is wrong, and that somehow they need to use hardware to isloate programs.
The issues they address in the first point were issues which I felt were meant to be addressed by IP6, has/will it fail? I always understood IP6 as being designed to (optionally) have secure connections, qos and an ip address structure to allow for floating nodes. Would IP6 not stand up to delivering messages in network time for the entire US military structure?
The second issue seems simple to me, yes it will be much more reliable if you use a seperate computer for each task and allow them to communicate, but can you tolerate the lack of flexibility and is it even possible to do anything meaningful without adding lots of parts and weight (the more parts, the less reliable). I can imagine building a chip which actually contains 8 386s and 32M or ram split into 4M per 386, then have the disk controller map the device in an 8 way split so they can't touch each others data, a network chip could act as a switch to all the information, providing qos etc. buses to expansion could be mapped to cpus, but is it worth it or are you better off building two different but functionally identical systems so if one fails the other shouldn't? Also it's still one machine, as soon as you actually split it out into a meaningful number of machines weight, size and handling all become a problem. It would be lovely if you could sew tiny bluetooth enabled cpus w/mem into all the army gear and then they cluster together into a super cpu which reads the soldiers thumbprinted data device to figure out what to do, but would that actually require any sort of fundamental shift in how computers are made to achieve?
To me this article simply states that they haven't managed to build a good enough network yet, and want some cash to do it, and that they haven't managed to build a reliable os/app combination to deal with their needs yet either! Just the talk of "One of the limitations inherent in this approach is that when an application malfunctions, it can affect other programs" made me think they need to look harder at their OS. I will be surprised if the end result isn't IP6 (perhaps a modified army version) but you never know! I wonder what OS they'll go with though?
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I'd like to point out that the internet your using right now came from DARPA doing the same thing in the 70's. If you don't want an internet that runs on protocols initially devised by the US military then you better unplug now.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
I think you might be wandering into tin-foil-hat land here.
They're talking about creating a networking standard we could all use to build our own networks. The specs will be open, like AES. (Or, do you believe that AES has some backdoor that lets the US military decrypt your private bits?)
I don't see any similiarity with GPS. That's a military controlled network of hardware, on which, we civilians are allowed to tag along. It's not public or commercial in any way. Nobody had any illusions about that, well, except maybe you.
-ave
...or maybe not.
DARPA and the military aren't interested in rebuilding the internet, they are interested in rebuilding IP.
They want to rebuild IP because they have a need for a better system. They need secure, reliable, ad hoc networking so that battle groups can communicate with each other.
These are private WANs. Not the Internet! The Military is not going to send real time battlefield data across the public internet, and real time battlefield data is what this thing is all about. The military launches and rents satellites for that sort of thing, they don't send it across uunet.
When they create a WAN, they have to have some mechanism to talk. Right now it might be IP, but in the future they want it to be something else. Something better for THEM.
The US Military couldn't care less if the rest of the world, or the internet itself, started to use whatever they come up with.
As far as those attacking technical limitations, when they started working on the original internet I'm sure everyone was saying, "Fault tolerant distributed networking with dynamic routing? That's impossible, why are they bothering" The point of DARPA is to do science and advance the field beyond current knowledge.
They may succeed, and they may fail. But they shouldn't just not try.
Most people seem to miss the fact that the R in DARPA stands for Research. Research is not done by accepting the status quo. If ARPA had not invested in the original network research, who knows were we would be today!
TCP/IP is not perfect for every use. If DARPA can find a better set of protocols to slide into layers three and four of the OSI model, more power to them.
Internet protocol suite
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.