RE: Identifiers

["marcelo bagnulo" <mbagnulo@ing.uc3m.es>]

>
> I agree, in order to build something that's usable we need to select
> one way of doing this, and standardize and implement this way of doing
> it. And a good way to do this would be taking working sessions and
> negotiate alternative addresses for them, without the use of an
> explicit identifier. However...

Ok, basically you are proposing to use one of the available IP addresses as
the identifier used by ULP, and then eventually introduce a new namespace
for identifiers which may provide with enhanced features.
The question now is how do you provide security for this negotiation of
alternative addresses in this first stage?
Because you will need to provide some sort of security even in this case.
The good thing about some other namespaces is that make the security
simpler, so when you want to use IP addresses, you need to solve the
security issues somehow, without these features provided by the new
identifier namespace.
So what would you think would be the security tools used for negotiating
multiple addresses in a solution that used IP addresses as ULP ids?

>
> > But, perhaps i misunderstood your proposal?
>
> What I'm saying is that even though it may not make sense to have full
> blown identifiers _today_, it's probably a good idea to recognize that
> we'll want to have them in the future, and make sure the actual
> multihoming protocol we're going to build now can be easily adapted to
> support identifiers.

Well, whichever solution we adopt to preserve established communication, i
guess that we have consensus that it will imply the upgrading of all the
hosts, inside and outside the multihomed site to support it (modulo
proxies).
So, if we agree that a new id namespace provides value and that should be
the final solution, why don't we just go for it and we require only one
upgrade to all the hosts in the Internet? (Actually this was your argument a
while ago, i am just quoting it because i found it very valuable :-)

Regards, marcelo

 This means that there must be unused or option
> fields in the messages that can be used to extend the protocol in a
> backward compatible way. Another important issue is that when
> identifiers are used, all negotiation must precede the actual
> communication, so we should build our protocol that it allows this if
> at all possible.
>
>