What Vint Cerf Would Do Differently (computerworld.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes ComputerWorld: Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn't mean there aren't things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again. "If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn't have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6," Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday... For security, public key cryptography is another thing Cerf would like to have added, had it been feasible.

Trouble is, neither idea is likely to have made it into the final result at the time. "I doubt I could have gotten away with either one," said Cerf, who won a Turing Award in 2004 and is now vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google. "So today we have to retrofit... If I could go back and put in public key crypto, I probably would try."
Vint Cerf answered questions from Slashdot users back in 2011.

Comments

IoA

[Anonymous Coward]

Is 128 bits enough? We really need to have enough bits to assign every atom in the universe an IP address.

32 bits address

[hcs_$reboot]

It seems Vint engages in self-flagellation each time someone raises the number of limited IPv4 addresses available (like "here"). At the time (40 years ago! The "640k is enough" meme is 'only' 35 y.o!), who would have anticipated the success of Internet? (and for starters, everyone would have reserved the juicy .com domains in the early 90's!). Vint Cerf did an awesome technical and visionary job and deserves a lot of credit for that.

UTF-8 style would have been better

[Kjella]

So the 1992 UTF-8 specification didn't exist when the 1983 IP specification was created, but they could have done:

First 2^31: 0(31)
Next 2^59: 110(29) 10(30)
Next 2^88: 1110(28) 10(30) 10(30)
Next 2^117: 11110(27) 10(30) 10(30) 10(30)

And just declared that for now it's 0(31) - still 2 billion addresses but the sky is the limit. Heck, they might even have used shorts (16 bit) that way and declared that hardware/software should update as the need approached:

First 2^15: 0(15)
Next 2^27: 110(13) 10(14)
Next 2^40: 1110(12) 10(14) 10(14)
Next 2^53: 11110(11) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14)
(...)
Next 2^140: 1111111111111111(0) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14) 10(14)

As for PKI, that couldn't possibly have happened. US export regulations wouldn't have allowed it at the time, this was long before Zimmerman and PGP.

Re: I wouldn't have

[demonlapin]

96 bytes was a lot of data in the mid-80s. On a 1200 bps connection, that's almost an entire second per packet. When I was a college student in the early 90s, we had 2400 bps modems in the dialup pool, and the entire university (~3000 students) lived on a 56k leased line. Nowadays, that's trivial. In 1984, not so much.

Re:Encode as ASCII

[bruce_the_loon]

The major problem your concept would cause is the massive increase in CPU load required to process text instead of simple bit masks, it may not matter for processing a couple of requests a second, but a core router handles trillions of packets and the text comparison process would require massive CPU capacity.

IP address space was designed for very rapid and low processor load bit masking to do route matching. To decide whether a route applies to an address, the netmask is applied to get rid of the more specific parts of the address and reduce the comparison to a simple equality operation.

We see IP addresses as a string of period separated numbers, but the address is the whole 8 byte number as a whole.

Additionally, your concept prevents the multiple path topology of the internet that results in the high resilience to damage we all know and love. Your system results in a single path into any domain space and that domain space is an invisible blob to the rest of the world.