Operator survey: Incrementally deployable secure Internet routing

Mon Jan 24 21:31:57 UTC 2022

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Friday, January 21st, 2022 at 22:07, Yixin Sun <yixins at alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

> Dear Nanog,
>
> We appreciate that your time is very precious, but we wanted to ask you for your help in answering a brief survey about a new secure routing system we have developed in a research collaboration between ETH, Princeton University, and University of Virginia.

Prateek, Adrian, and Yixin,

With the greatest of respect I'm afraid this kind of exemplifies the sort of dream-ware that can only be thought up in the cozy confines of a university campus.

Why do I say this ?

Because the first thing that I thought of when I read the subject line of your email and a cursory glance through the body was "Uh huh, I've heard this sort of thing somewhere before", and that somewhere was ....

IPv6 was sold as "incrementally deployable", and with IPv6 we're talking something natively dual-stack operating over the same old "internet".

And look where we are today ? A decade or so on and the world is still nowhere near 100% IPv6 coverage, with some major networks still not anywhere near, and with other major networks only just launching IPv6 (e.g. the hyperscalers ... or at least some of them).  And that's before we start considering the developing world.

Or if we put IPv6 to one side.  Why do you think BGP is *still* so stubbornly here ?  Because it works (most of the time), everyone knows how it works, and its been battle tested.

So the chances of something more drastic like your proposal ever seeing the light of day beyond some university labs ?

Sorry to rain on your parade guys !

Laura