Re: [Int-area] Continuing the addressing discussion: what is an address anyway?

[Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 11:30 AM Geoff Huston <[e-mail]> wrote:
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> > On 26 Jan 2022, at 5:17 am, Tom Herbert <[e-mail]> wrote:
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> > On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 3:38 AM Geoff Huston <[e-mail]> wrote:
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> >>
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> >>> On 25 Jan 2022, at 6:19 pm, Dirk Trossen <dirk.trossen=[e-mail]> wrote:
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> >>> All,
> >>>
> >>> Thanks for the great discussion, following our side meeting at IETF 112, so far.
> >>>
> >>> I wanted to turn the discussion to a key question which not only arose in the side meeting already but also in the discussions since, namely “what is an address anyway?”.
> >>>
> >>
> >> In this world of NATs it seems that we treat addresses as no more than temporary ephemeral session tokens and we've passed all the heavy lifting of service identification over to the name system. These days you and I could be accessing the same service yet we could b e using entirely different addresses to do so. Or I could be accessing the same service at different times, and again be using different addresses each time. I find it somewhat ironic that we see increasing moves to pull in IP addresses as part of the set of personal information in some regulatory regimes, yet what the larger network sees of end clients is a temporary NAT binding to a public address that may be shared by hundreds if not thousands of others.
> >>
> >> And IPv6’s use of privacy addressing achieves a similar outcome in a different way. And QUIC’s use of the session token inside the encrypted envelope even makes the binding of an address to a single session fluid, as the same QUIC session can be address agile on the client side.
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> >> So perhaps an address these days is just an ephemeral transport token and really has little more in the way of semantic intent.
> >
> > Geoff,
> >
> > That might be true for QUIC, but not for TCP. Each TCP endpoint
> > requires stable addresses for the lifetime of the connection since the
> > addresses are part of the four-tuple identifying the connection.
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> Tom,
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> I think you may have missed my initial characterisation of IP addresses in your response: "we treat addresses as no more than temporary ephemeral _session_ tokens” i.e. the NAT model relies on session level stability of the NAT association.
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> My comment about QUIC is that the QUIC protocol does not even require that session-level stability of address association, and QUIC sessions essentially require stability of association only on a time basis approaching the RTT interval.
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Yes, but TCP doesn't have those properties so we are bound by that at
the least common denominator on the Internet until TCP is obsoleted.

> If you wish to construe various judgemental observations (Like "NAT is evil”, “NBATs break stuff”, etc,) feel free, but they are your constructions, not mine. The issue for me is not judgments of “good” or “bad”, but simply to explore, without overtones of judgement, exactly what an IP address represents in today’s Internet.
>
I'm not sure how I was making a judgment, NAT devices do factually and
transparently break transport layer connections when NAT state is
evicted, packets are rerouted, or network devices crash. Any
discussion about what addresses are in the current Internet has to
include this consideration. My point is that there are host
requirements relating to addresses that the network must be aware of
if it is applying more semantics than just for routing (this probably
degenerates to the age-old problem that IP addresses convey both
identity and location).

Tom

> Geoff
>