Re: PI/metro/geo [Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development]

[RJ Atkinson <rja@extremenetworks.com>]

On Monday, Nov 4, 2002, at 18:31 America/Montreal, Tony Li wrote:
> |   In fact we have an existence proof in both DNS & IEEE EUI that
> |   inadvertent & intentional duplication happens. So those
> |   mechanisms can't
> |   be used as 'globally unique' identifiers as they are. If we add 
> some
> |   cryptographic properties, we can probably improve that.
>
>
> Ok, but do we need actual perfect uniqueness?  Or just 'pretty close'?
> Operationally, 'pretty close' is a whole lot easier.
We don't *have* perfect uniqueness today.  www.cnn.com is a set of 
hosts,
not a single host.  DNS names are NOT globally unique today.
Neither are IP addresses, thanks to NAT or other widgets (e.g. load
balancer in front of server farm).

Since we don't have it today, I don't see how demanding absolute 
uniqueness
of identifiers is a reasonable thing to demand.  And forged identifiers
are trivial today.  In a new system there could be (at least) a 
mechanism
for providing optional authentication of the identifier.

Ran