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

Crypto? They *removed* that from IPv6...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, IPv6 AH (authentication -- forged packets are "impossible"), and IPv6 ESP (encryption, for privacy) through IPSEC were a non-optional part of the protocol until a few years ago.

But industry-wide incompetence, the interference from the usual suspects, as well as the usual shit pulled by the embedded space crowd killed it down to "optional". Yes, IPSEC can be nasty (mostly because of IKE), but it would be *something*.

For one, it would have killed DNS poisoning much better, and much earlier, than DNSSEC ever could (hint: DNSSEC has pathetic security as deployed right now).

It is not like the usual suspects had to kill AH to protect their need for mass-spying, making ESP optional would be enough (and outlaw it where required). But no, they need to actually be able to inject false traffic (which *is* against the !@#$!@#$ law everywhere, even for governments)...

There *was* a proposal simpler than IPv6.. IPxl

[Anonymous Coward]

http://bill.herrin.us/network/ipxl.html

A one-page solution, too simple of course for a huge committee to accept.

If only someone could have convinced a few key router manufacturers (Cisco) and Linux to adopt this, perhaps we could get critical mass and make IPv6 irrelevant. I guess it wouldn't have been enough of a make-work project though.

Re:public routing table vs connection tuple

[swb]

I always thought the Netware IPX/SPX network numbering system was quite clever -- 32 bits of network addressing and a 48 bit node address, usually based on MAC addresses.

I always think of how much simpler IP would have been with a similar structure -- subnets could have scaled easily without renumbering or routing when common /24 limits were hit. The use of MAC addresses for node addresses would have eliminated DHCP for the most part or essentially automated it as clients would have only had to query for a network number, not a node address.

Re:IoA

[jellomizer]

At the time 32 bits seemed like a lot of data to send.
On a 300bps modem it would take a noticeable fraction of a second. 64bit or 128 bit would take much longer, and slowdown nearly everything. Also RAM was small think kilobytes having to store that much data would be sacrificing it somewhere else in the code.

In short if it were implement back then, it would never catch on, and we would be using a different networking protocol now. Perhaps one with much more problematic limitations.

Today using 128bit address having the ability to give more IP Addresses than possible in the universe, really make sure that just randomly picking an address probably will not create a duplicate address.