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Vint Cerf's Dream Do-Over: 2 Ways He'd Make the Internet Different

posted by janrinok on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-only-I-could-do-it-over dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

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 during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany.

IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially ran out of new addresses based on IPv4.

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."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:31AM (#406110)
    NAT breaks the end to end nature of the Internet and makes true peer to peer communication very cumbersome. Hackers (the good kind) would also love the idea that every device out there will have a routeable IP address, as it makes peer to peer applications much easier. And who says that IPv6 addresses need to be permanent on every device? There is nothing that mandates this. There exists a divide these days from people who have true, routable IP addresses and those who don't. The former are able to publish content, the latter are only able to consume. And if you wanted privacy and security, that is also possible with a large address space, and easier. You want a stateful firewall and a VPN, which are designed primarily for security, not a kludge for the purpose of allowing multiple hosts to share limited IP addresses.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @01:40AM (#406118)

    How many permanent IP addresses does the world need? Probably less than 100 million. OK, we'd run out of them eventually, but a 64-bit address space would solve that problem for at least the next 30 years.

    You don't need a 128-bit address space when almost all of the IP addresses are transient.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @04:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 25 2016, @04:54AM (#406166)
      Right. And as Bill Gates once said, 640KB should be enough for everyone.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday September 25 2016, @09:01PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Sunday September 25 2016, @09:01PM (#406392) Journal

      Limiting the Internet to 100 million addresses that can accept incoming connections is like saying "Only one person out of 70 should be allowed to run a website or other publicly accessible resource."