Hi Tony, First off, in reply to your subject, I think that connecting to the Internet is mandatory, or there would be no reason to be submitting this work to the IETF.
> Margret has raised several valuable questions about > draft-ietf-ipv6-cellular-host-00.txt, which show it is clearly is not > ready for last call. Its good to see technical discussion on the draft. The authors really do appreciate feedback on the draft, what is a good idea and what is not. > While I am willing to believe that there are valid > reasons to make adjustments based on characteristics of the link, this > document is fundamentally flawed because it is based around > the pretense that small footprint devices are somehow special. We MUST > NOT allow ourselves to modify well thought out architectural > fundamentals based on point-in-time engineering constraints that are dubious > at best. If a device wants to participate as an Internet node, there are basic > requirements. Of course, participating in the Internet is optional, so > if a device would prefer to avoid the requirements, it may choose to > create its own universe. The IETF is an (mostly) an engineering body and engineering is the science of working with constraints. I do think that discussion on what is appropriate and what is not is a very good thing. The IETF has chartered working groups which do take considerations of devices, links, networks, so I don't see what we have been suggesting is out of place. > The argument that small devices have limited processors or memory > overlooks the fact that the processor and memory of many hand-held > devices today is significantly greater than the workstations that were > available when IPv4 was defined. Interesting point; there was > no problem getting the stack and an array of applications to fit then. Another > interesting point; there are frequently rumors that laptops > will include cellular interfaces, so where does the processing and memory > constraint fit in that case? In general, the authors approach has been to be conservative in what is sent and generous in what is accepted. Consider that many of the cellular hosts will have limited configurability, limited upgradability, limited power yet must be extremely robust - it isn't only about processing power or memory limitations. Additionally, most of the power savings on laptops & cell phones come from the careful usage of resources, not due to increases in battery technology - when considering signaling, I think it is a perfectly acceptable consideration to see what is necessary to send and what is not. This is what we have been attempting to do in our draft. > On the subject of applications, the absolute BS about limiting the > application set to avoid an IPsec requirement is something > that belongs in a product development discussion, NOT a standards > discussion. The one point that should be clear is that over time the number of > applications used via wireless (cellular or otherwise) will grow, and that we can't > predict what they are, much less what they will need from the > stack. To that point, we MUST reiterate that ***ALL IPv6 IMPLEMENTATIONS MUST > INCLUDE SUPPORT FOR IPSEC***. If we relax that requirement, > applications will never be able to expect support, therefore will have to keep > inventing their own mechanisms. The only way to prevent new > applications from appearing on computing devices is to put the executable code in > non-rewritable, non-replaceable, rom. Tony, we are not looking at removing requirements for IPsec. However, we all know that IPsec is not a magic bullet, which will solve security issues. Again, we have been trying to deal as realistically as we can with what security solutions fit into what scenarios. In several documents that I have been involved in, the IESG has commented on security sections - stating that better thought needs to be given when IPsec is used, dependancy in PKI, and what other methods are applicable. This is the considerations which we have tried to bring up in the document. If you feel that it is a MUST to implement IPsec on all devices that use IPv6 & connect to the Internet, wouldn't it have been easier to say just that? thanks, John -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
