Re: future of identifiers

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

Just a suggestion, but...

it might be a good thing if we were to first identify what needs to be identified.

I think RFC 1992's model of an identifier (a string of some kind that identifies an application API, and moves with the API) makes a lot of sense. Such a thing would, for example, simplify VM motion in data centers. Taking that model into information-centric/name-based networking, one could imagine it being a string that an application uses to identify itself when it expresses interest in a class of data.

If it's something along those lines, I doubt that it's in any character set, and by the way, while it might have a current-set-of-ip-addresses, it's not an IP address or the EID component of one. I could imagine it being almost anything that can be built into a string, and then signed using an 802.1AR certificate or one from another source.

I could imagine law enforcement "expressing interest" in an interesting party's communications. Or the mafia, or the person's spouse. There might be some interesting security angles.

But seriously, I'd suggest we start from first principles before thinking about solutions here. What needs to be identified, and what characteristics does it have?

On Oct 29, 2013, at 7:38 AM, Jari Arkko <[e-mail]> wrote:

> For background, when I visited the ICANN meeting last summer, they were about to launch a set of panels to advice themselves about key topics in coming years. I promised to join one of them, on identifier technology innovation (along with a few other IETFers). The topic for this effort is future evolution of DNS and other identifiers, including relevant security and management aspects. The viewpoint is primarily to look at this from ICANN’s angle, but of course the matter is interesting to us others as well. 
> 
> And perhaps we at the IETF should also understand the same things. Hence this e-mail.
> 
> I have some ideas on what some of these trends might be. But what do the rest of you think? Where is identifier technology going, and what new things are on the horizon? What do we need to do with IDNs? DNSSEC? What will DANE lead to, and how will id-locator split techniques evolve & be deployed? How will applications or users think about identifiers in the future?
> 
> More information at http://www.ietf.org/blog/2013/10/future-identifiers/
> 
> Jari
>