Governing an Internet

47 Pages·2012·2 MB·English

by  Philip Levis

Governing an Internet
JON PETERSON
OCTOBER 2012
WITH MATERIAL BORROWED FROM GEOFF
HUSTON, OLAF KOLKMAN, ARBOR NETWORKS,
HURRICANE ELECTRIC, AND SEVERAL IETF
PLENARIES
What is the Internet?
  This is a deceptively tricky question
A series of tubes?
 
Don’t laugh at Ted Stevens
 
A collection of routers?
 
The smarts to move things between tubes
 
An agreement of companies?
 
Interconnection, peering, compensation
 
A stack of protocols?
 
The Internet Protocol (IP), among many others?

A definition, for today
  The Internet is
An overlay over a diverse set of physical networks, with the
 
property that:
any computer with an Internet Protocol address can send
 
arbitrary information to any other computer with an Internet
Protocol address
  IP is the glue that binds physical networks to
applications
The “waist of the hourglass”
 
Many different physical networks run below it
 
Many different applications run above it

So who controls IP?
  IP invented by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
Specified in a document series called the Requests for Comment (RFCs):
 
IPv4 circa 1981 [RFC791]
Most Internet protocols are specified in RFCs
 
Email, the web, Voice over IP, TCP, BGP, DNS, TLS, you name it
 
Today, the Internet Engineering Task Force publishes standard RFCs
 
The standards of the Internet
 
The IETF has change control over IP as a specification
 
  IP addresses originally handled by Jon Postel (1943-1998)
Along with domain names, when they came around
 
Eventually, this job had to migrate to a team
 
  The first “Internet Architect” was Dave Clark
Eventually, his position was fielded out to an appointed group called the
 
Internet Architecture Board
IPv4, IPv6 and the Internet
  You’ve probably heard that the IPv4 space is depleted
The IETF developed a protocol called IPv6 with more address space
 
  However, IPv6 has not yet become mainstream
The Internet’s stakeholders invested tremendously in IPv6
 
Lack of adoption is a constant challenge and puzzle
 
  The IAB is responsible for the administration of protocol
parameter values managed by IANA
IANA formed to carry on the work of Jon Postel (1943-1998)
 
Maintains records for the root of the DNS, autonomous system
 
numbers, IP address allocation, and various related fields
So who can make IPv6 happen, then?

Who to Blame?
IANA

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
IAB
Internet Architecture Board
ICANN
Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers
Regional Internet
Registries (RIRs)

ARIN, RIPE, AFRINIC, APNIC,
LACNIC
Pretty much everyone
In the beginning…
  IPv4 came out in the early 1980s
  The young Internet lived in a world of mainframes
Many user terminals leashed to one central machine on the Internet
 
Personal microcomputers in the first generation, few modems even
 
Internet backbone ran only to advanced research facilities
 
  Only researchers really cared about Internet resources
  IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses: e.g., 134.10.2.45
Surely 4.2B addresses are enough!
 
  "I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers." – surely apocryphal remark attributed to
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM
Address Blocks and Classes
  Originally, IPv4 allocated carelessly (see [RFC943])
  Class A (/8)
16,777,216 IPv4 Addresses
 
Stanford: 36.0.0.0/8 (Student body: 6000U/8000G)
 
1/256th of the entire IP addressing space!
 
Famously, 1st IETF Chair Mike Corrigan had his own (21.0.0.0/8)
 
  Class B (/16)
65,536 IPv4 Addresses
 
Reed College: 134.10.0.0/16 (for ~1200 students)
 
Stanford had one of these too (128.12.0.0/16)
 
  Class C (/24)
256 IPv4 Addresses
 
  Class D and E never saw much use (multicast)
  Simplified routing: easy to aggregate prefixes
Presented at
the IETF in
1990
We’ve known IPv4
depletion was coming
for a long time
These notes predict
Class B depletion
“Imminent death of the
net predicted,” but
didn’t happen quite as
people thought then
Growing Importance of the Internet
  By the early 1990s, the Internet had grown up
Jon Postel simply could not scale anymore, IANA became a discrete
 
entity
  From this point forward, only multi-stakeholder address
assignments were feasible
InterNIC, RIPE NCC and APNIC all founded around 1992
 
  ICANN created in 1998 as a successor to InterNIC
  ARIN formed in 1997 to administer IP addresses
Takes large blocks from IANA to distribute in North America and the
 
Caribbean
Jon Postel originally on the board
 
Originally covered Latin America and Africa as well
 
Eventually split off into LACNIC and AfriNIC
 
  People started to care who owned which addresses
Ultimately, the root of may security questions
