Huawei proposes to replace TCP/IP at ITU
internetsociety.org
internetsociety.org
Personally, I would not trust anything Huawei produces because of their history of design flaws and bad software practices, as well as their ties to the Chinese government. However, I do see value in reworking some systems, such as BGP and DNS, which have been patched with optional additions to compensate for the trusting nature of its designers back when ARPAnet was small and contained little reason to execute hijacks of resources.
Protections for existing protocols are available though, so instead of reworking protocols and creating telecom-only protocols, perhaps enforcing certain features (BGP security, DNSSEC, etc.) for a provider to be able to name their service "5G" (or "6G" or whatever the next standard is) to make companies give a damn about security. The same tactic can also enforce proper filtering to prevent spoofed phone calls on the backbone that American wireless carriers seem to be so awful at.
Might well use lobbying of smaller ITU member nations to try and get this through. Oh all that debt for that port we built as part of the belt and road.
And the optics of China putting pressure on the WHO in the early stages of the pandemic not looking good.
Do you have references to what you're referring to?
You can also search this site for "huawei". Almost none of the submissions paint them in a good light.
Research found no backdoors, but all reported vulnerabilities were due to unsafe coding practices, many many different version of the same library being reused across the software of their devices with many of those versions being outdated and just generally a crummy job at coding. There was very little malice found, only bad practices.
This was compared to vendors like Cisco where secret passwords and backdoors were hidden obfuscated in their code, which can only mean the company intended for the backdoor to be there. Personally, I'd buy Huawei before Cisco given that incompetence is easier to forgive than straight-out malice in my opinion, but the conclusion remains that Huawei software isn't always up to snuff which can be a problem when you're trying to push a replacement for the core of the internet for your software.
And to be honest, china can give a really big shit about 'international' they are the producers of goods for the world and or payed them self into other country's, so its take it or leave it, and Huawei has the best router's for that new shit ;)
Informed by this fact of wanting to be a rent seeker, one can guess that Huawei would want big dollar for a copy of the standard, and maybe a small license fee for every client. I'd also bet money that there'd be a large license fee to run a server, and that there's a protocol-level division between "server" and "client", something that just doesn't exist in TCP or IP. It's possible to centralize control by means of "Intellectual Property" law and standards organization, just as it's possible to centralize control with built-in kill switches.
Oh, yeah: I used to think (in 1990-2000 timeframe) that maybe Microsoft would be the corporate entity to try to pull this sort of thing off. I often speculated about "MSTCP" being the thing to put the Internet's genie back in the bottle. I was wrong about that.
This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish play.
Phones and devices can support that, but if outside China, it has no one to talk to.
Though, even in that case it can lead to backdoors.
If !(in China) _disable_
Although even that will cause unnecessary headache for hardware and OS vendors and will/might still lead to new security issues and backdoors.
It's always a tradeoff and the cost of the chip in itself is not the sole decision driver.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/03/sign-in-with-appl...
This would be a step beyond that, but what if China mandated phones can't be sold there unless manufacturer's phones in other regions support their standard.
And that sign-in is just for china, not outside of it.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-30-china-huawei-new-ip-prop...
https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/11/chinas-next-plan-to-domina...
So, Huawei knows that they need something which is not IP and tries to make hardware that supports it commodity product instead of niche telco weirdness by trying to push their thing as end-all solution to everything networking. In fact, from this PoV this is somewhat reminiscent of late 90's and ATM.
Not to mention, in my opinion, the ITU is far less transparent and more prone to backroom dealing.
https://www.save2m.org/2019/08/france-defeated-thales-and-th...
- reduce routing table sizes by using explicit AS routing
- have src and dst AS numbers in IP packet headers
and route based on explicit AS numbers
- that would require a decent network prefix to AS
number lookup service
- maybe reduce IPv6 address sizes to 64 bits
- complete deployment of rpsec
- make TCP a bit more dynamic (e.g., change window
scaling after handshake)
- fix IPsec -- specifically get RFC5660 implemented
everywhere, add channel binding support>that would require a decent network prefix to AS number lookup service
I don't see the advantage of this. All you're doing is offloading the routing table to every client device rather than at core routers only. Also, the "AS number lookup service" would be like a DNS request, which adds latency to every connection.
> - maybe reduce IPv6 address sizes to 64 bits
why? The only advantage I can think of is that it's easier to remember/enter for humans, which isn't really a good reason because there's DNS anyways.
It'd reduce the size of the IPv6 header, allowing more data per 1500 mtu packet. There's a lot of situations that are bound by packet rate limits, not bandwidth concerns.
BTW, if we're going to radically reimagine the internet, we should really push for a 9000+ MTU.
It's a bit like the maxima in ZFS.
Current technology allows to pick maxima so large that we can just forget about them, so why not do it?
So in cases where we're packet limited and not bandwidth limited we'd get a 1.1% throughput boost (1460 IP payload vs 1476). Seems like a fair tradeoff for never having to worry about NAT or address exhaustion ever again.
IPv6 already mandates path MTU discovery and min MTU of 1280.
The better way to do it is to forget about a lookup service and make the AS number a part of the IP address. This is why you do want 128-bit addresses. You could make the AS the first 32 bits of the address and then each AS would have four billion /64 networks.
But in practice this is basically what you get with IPv6 anyway. The problem with IPv4 is that because there aren't enough addresses, you have people wanting to add dozens of network prefixes to the same AS because they couldn't get a single contiguous block large enough for their needs. With IPv6 you can give every AS a /32 with 96 bits worth of addresses in it and they'd never need another one.
Edit: OK, not sure why that got a downvote. Did somebody think I was being sarcastic or something?
The problem is with 64-bit addresses you'd only have 40 bits left for the whole AS. They'd quickly run out if they gave each customer a 32-bit block, so they'd have to use 20-bit blocks or so.
Then you have corporate customers who want to do complex internal subnetting, for which 20-bit wide blocks are administratively burdensome. 10.0.0.0/8 is 24-bit and they already run into problems there. They start having to use variable-sized subnets because the main office needs a 14-bit wide block but you don't have enough addresses to give every office that many, and then you have to renumber any time the size of an office changes, and probably renumber two other offices to free up a large enough contiguous address block.
That all goes away if you can give every customer billions of addresses and they don't have to worry about their subnets being "too big" which means they never end up being too small.
On top of that, you don't actually know that it's a /64. The customer could have a /56. The customer could have a /128, which some mobile ISPs do. The customer could have a /128 with the ability to request arbitrarily many of them from the ISP, allowing the same trick with one IP per outgoing connection but causing the pool to be shared across all the ISP's customers. The ISP could, in principle, allow the customer to request an arbitrary number of non-contiguous address ranges of an arbitrary size and use them for an arbitrary duration before reassignment to a different customer. Nothing really requires it to be a single /64 forever.
2. its impossible to uniquely globally tag each person with an ip
The idea of BGP works fine but needs to have the proper security measures in place. I don't think TCP/IP should contain complex routing systems like that.
I'd love to have IPsec to become the HTTPS for all protocols but there's no way that's going to happen without a proper mechanism to support random connections. My attempts at making IPsec work for communication between devices (so not just L2TP VPNs) so far have all been thwarted by complicated software configurations and outdated guides with questionable security recommendations.
Clients don't (and shouldn't) care about the routing information built into the address, but building the ASN into the IP address isn't so bad. And to keep things compact, the ASN could be in little endian order.
A better way would’ve been to just used bullets and newlines.
Advocates seem to respond by saying "use DNS," which shows me that they've never really done any IT work or are forgetting their experience. Every IT person knows "its always DNS." When DNS is down, the first thing you have to do is type IPs. You also have to type IPs a lot when setting things up, often on keyboards hanging off things in data centers and other inconvenient spots. Don't get me started on embedded stuff.
If IPv6 continues to stall, I think it might be worth introducing an RFC to retroactively shorten it. You'd leave the addresses the same really but you'd re-interpret the first 64 bits as the IP and the last 64 bits as a kind of extended port field. Specifying those bits is optional and they default to zero.
Then change assignment recommendations so every ISP endpoint gets at least a /48 (/40 preferred, /32 for business and larger links) and deprecate SLAAC in favor of DHCP6.
Lastly change the representation to something like:
feed.d00d.dead.beef[.deadbeefcafebabe]
(that's valid hex for anyone who doesn't know that's valid hex)
Anything whose least significant bits are all zero like feed.d00d.0.0 would of course be an IPv4 address.
Then give important machines simple addresses. Assigning your DHCP server [network prefix]::3 and your file server [network prefix]::4 instead of [network prefix]:[64-bit random number] simplifies things a lot. You can also do this with link-local addresses, so then your local file server can be accessed as fe80::4, or something not too far away from that with ULAs if it's not on the same network segment, e.g. fc00:abcd::4.
Also what about the vast, vast number of cases where you want to address private backplane networks and do things like "ping 10.0.0.2"? People still largely use V4 there even if they have V6 because V6 is too inconvenient.
DNS fixes this problem on connected, configured systems when everything is working property. It does not fix the problem when there are issues or when things are being set up, developed with, debugged, etc.
> what about the vast majority of people who have less expertise and less time/resources to deploy complex configurations?
"Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible."
There exist IPv6 ISPs that give you a modem/router that you plug your stuff into and there is nothing else to configure. They could all do that. That covers the large majority of people who just want to internet as quickly as possible.
If you want to have complex internal subnets and backplane networks and things like that, this is a thing that requires technical knowledge to begin with.
I suspect the reason people continue to use IPv4 for such things is simply that they're more familiar with it and it still works. And so what's wrong with that? The primary advantage of IPv6 is that it gives every device a globally routed address. It still does that if people carry on using dual stack with IPv4 until the end of time. Or however many decades until IPv6 has enough penetration that people have gotten used to it and start to turn IPv4 off.
You can use IPv6 long before IPv4 ceases to exist.
You know that they are totally separate protocols, right?
On the other hand there really is no reason to create one unified protocol to solve all that at once. IETF's “all that can be done on IP and this is how” is kind of bold statement, as there are applications where only reason to involve IP is marketing, eg. there is little reason to involve IP in various hard-realtime-ish short range IoT-ish things (that one popular hard-realtime safety critical industrial automation protocol involves not only IP but DCOM on top of slightly non-standard ethernet to solve problem that is perfectly solved by RS-485 based bus is another thing)
For every single problem there will be a hypothetical ideal solution that's custom in every way like a bespoke suit, but you (or your customers) probably can't afford that solution and so that's the wrong solution.
If IP isn't good enough, I would strongly urge you to go help it be better rather than sit on the sidelines saying people shouldn't bother using IP. Mostly for self-preservation reasons, if it can be done somebody is going to do it, and that might as well be you - if it can't be done you'll end up the expert on why not.
† Really often these applications says they use IP to benefit from this ecosystem but they aren't on the Internet, and when you look closer - oops, nobody told the people implementing them about not being on the Internet, so they actually are on the Internet, peeking out from unexpected places.
Sigh I could have had such a cool email address if that had taken off C=UK CN=Nickname - I was third line support for the UK x.400 ADMD and had admin
I recall some calculations that showed a decrease in latency over long distances because light travels slightly faster in a vacuum, there are fewer intermediate nodes over that distance, and a more direct path can be used than in our existing wired networks.
The biggest issue with current satellite connections is that the satellites are in geostationary orbits which imposes a minimum theoretical latency of something like half a second. It's physically impossible to send signals any faster[2].
1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/musk-...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Sign...
The shutdown you're thinking of was from the IETF [0], who of were publicly responding to the presentation publicly forwarded to them by the ITU [1].
Of course IETF are incentivized to think the process of protocol evolution they coordinate is the right place and way to set standards (but that doesn't mean they're wrong). Now ITU stakeholders are chiming in, and we can expect to see more over the coming months.
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1677/ [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653/
In other words, this ITU participant is telling Huawei if they think their tech is such hot shit then go write an RFC and get bottom-up adoption of their idea like everyone else.