Re: [Ideas] New revision posted on draft-ccm-ideas-identity-use-cases

[Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 5:30 PM, Alexander Clemm
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> FWIW, we have just posted an updated revision of the draft on Identity Use Cases in IDEAS:
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ccm-ideas-identity-use-cases-02
>
> We took into account and tried to address recent discussions on the mailing list to improve on the previous version and hopefully alleviate at least some of the concerns that were raised.


Hello,

I have a comment on the definition of "identity" in IDEAS.

This draft defines identity as:

"IDy: Identity - an identifier for a communications entity that MAY be
assigned by the GRIDS-provider and that is used by the provider to
identify and authenticate the communications entity, but that is not
revealed in the packet headers."

By my count this is at least the fifth definition of identity that has
been proposed either in drafts or on the list, and this one is no more
enlightening than any of the previous definitions. First of all, this
says identity is an "identifier". Does this mean that identity is a
type of identifier per the definition of identifier above? Secondly,
this says identity is used to identify a communication entity, however
above it says an identifier "denotes information to unambiguously
identify a communications entity"-- so both of them "identify a
communications entity"... I don't see the difference.

The rest of the draft, including the picture of the relationship
between identifiers, identify, and locators, seems to imply a
potentially more useful and crisp definition of identity. As stated in
the introduction: "An IDy serves as a collection of identifiers that
are associated with the same endpoint". This could be rephrased to
define identity as "a group of identifiers that share some common
properties". Given this "group" definition of identity, then it
becomes natural to consider group policy and group operations over
sets of identifiers.

Tom