Re: Machine Identity

[Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 02:05:27PM +0100,
>  Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote 
>  a message of 19 lines which said:
>
> > There are solutions for some protocols (SSH keys of RFC 4251 or Host
> > Identifiers of HIP in RFC 4423 are two good examples) but no general
> > "identity layer" in the Internet architecture.
>
> An example of an Use Case is given by IKE (RFC 4306). Section 3.5
> lists several possible identities for a machine, and there is not a
> clear unique way to define this identity (identities like ID_IPV4_ADDR
> are typically a poor way to define a machine on the network).


What I found was:

     "used for policy lookup... may be used by an
   implementation to perform access control decisions"

That means that the identifier must be persistent and public, I believe.  It's 
unlikely that a statistically rare (rather than unique) identifier would be 
acceptable for this.  That means a uniqueness registration process is required.

Domain names satisfy these requirements.

So what's wrong with using them for the applications you have in mind?

d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net