Re: Re[4]: national security

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On 28-nov-03, at 14:47, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:

I guess not because I have no idea what you're talking about.

There is a natural tendency to think that by dividing a 128-bit address
field into two 64-bit fields, the address space is cut in half (or
perhaps not diminished at all).

Ah, I see what you mean now. However, the devision is a done deal as RFC 3513 mandates that all unicast IPv6 addresses except the ones starting with the bits 000 must have a 64-bit interface identifier in the lower 64 bits. This has some important advantages, most notably it allows stateless autoconfiguration. (However, this could have been done with 48 bits too.) But it does have the downside you mention by only leaving 64 bits for numbering subnets. The practice of giving all sites a /48 further deminishes the available bits. The situation is most notable in the case of a home user, who would get a single IPv4 address but gets a /48 in IPv6. So we've quadrupled our address space (in bits) for a 50% gain... (Obviously the situation is much better when looking at a university that has a /16 now and also gets a /48 as well.)


Putting a 64-bit crypto-based host identifier in the bottom 64 bits of IPv6 addresses shouldn't get in the way of regular IPv6 addressing mechanisms and/or operation. There is even a trick to make sure there is no overlap with either MAC addresses/EUI-64s on the one hand and most manually configured addresses and RFC 3041 on the other hand by only using EUI-64 compatible values with the universal/local bit set to globally unique, but with the group bit set.

It's unlikely you'll have 2^64 countries
to accommodate; and it's equally unlikely that each of these countries
will have exactly 2^64 hosts (no more, no less) to address, so you are
wasting many bits of the address field.

The plan isn't to encode a country in the first 64 bits. However, together with someone else I came up with an unrelated proposal a while ago that does encode a country in the IPv6 address. (You can find it at http://www.muada.com/drafts/ under the name "gapi".) In this proposal we use 16 bits to allocate a /32 to regions with 250 - 500 thousand inhabitants, so there is no fixed boundary for the country number.




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