Stephen Kent wrote:
<snip>Why restrict how you/I/we can communicate? The technical system should not pass its limitations as features.
If I am a member of multiple communities, and if I have a cert issued by each community for use in its context, I don't need to communicate AMONG the communities, just within them.
<snip>I quote from your paper, with the relevant text in bold: 3.1.2. Distinguished NamesThe first question of Section 3.1. was "who is S?", which has to be answered with a name-like attribute. Of course, if we use natural names we will not go very far before a similar name is found in the world population. Thus, to allow for programs (i.e., verifiers, subjects, etc.) to deal with entities in the Internet, it is necessary to have a "naming convention" that may allow a unique and singular name to be used for each entity -- which is usually called a "Distinguished Name" or DN. With DNs, it would be possible to uniquely associate entities to contract numbers, accounts, etc., without requiring the account numbers, etc. to be also unique. The problem is that there is no naturally found DN for each member of the human race, computer, machine, etc. Of course, if such a DN existed, then the reference problem in the Internet would also not exist. But since the Internet is void of a standard reference as we saw in Section 1, this means that the DN question has also no extrinsic solution. DNS names are "natural" in the Internet and provide unique IDs for machines, at the granularity needed for the sorts of applications we are discussing.The paper at http://www.mcg.org.br/cie.htm is name-agnostic. That text is not in the beginning and
is NOT a problem handled by the paper. The paper just makes the (correct) affirmation that X.500
DNs do not work as expected. The reader can use any naming convention the reader wants --
including DNS names or DNs.
<snip>Why do you say that? Any DNS name specifies a path from the root to an node the the DNS tree, just as an X.500 DN does. What is not hierarchic about a DNS name?
As Stef has already discussed
elswhere, the DNS naming scheme is an ontology. That is, it is hierarchical
only in that the totality of names
in the tree is a hierarchy, but there need be no meaningful relationship
between the names at any
level of the DNS name tree.
DNS names bear no specific relationship
to anything, hierarchical or not. Some people want them to
represent geography, others want
them to confirm to rigid product and service categories, others want them
to be used a Directory.
There are many hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships you can
define
within the *same* DNS name space.
The environment is potentially much more complex and varied than
a relatively simple one dimensional
hierarchy, inckuding: (1) territories (e.g., cnri.reston.va.us), (2) type
of
sponsoring institution (e.g., fcc.gov),
or (3) a hybrid of the two (e.g., dillons.co.uk). Because the Internet
is
basically an open, distributed
information system, the identifiers aren't really tied to any physical
notion of
geographical exercise of sovereignty
either.
Also, contrary to DNs assigned by
a RA as defined in X.509, most DNS names are self assigned and then
are registered in some system that
is used to advertise arbtrarily assigned bindings to other entities.
Cheers,
Ed Gerck