Hi, there's currently a stream of proposals that put random bits on the Interface ID of an IPv6 address. A background assumption is that the length of the Interface ID is 64 bits. Another assumption is that since those ID's are generated from random sources, then their uniqueness is guaranteed for practical purposes.
May I point out the following: -mathematical uniqueness is not guaranteed, there's already an acknowledged collision probability. -to this probability one should add "administrative probability" where same prefixes are accidentally assigned to two entities. -add implementation error probabilities, where a widespread implementation uses a weak algorithm to generate that random numbers, for example use as input time of day or the birth date, or short passphrases, etc. -add the p in prf. The last three factors are very hard to quantify, and as such the overall probability of collision events also seems to me very hard to quantify. Just a thought, born out of contemplating randomness. What do you think? Alex -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
