Re: Service Identity (Re: Machine Identity)

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder at jacobs-university.de>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 03:55:32PM +0100, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> Most very likely vhost X has a different IP from host Y, thus using IP's 
> here is one way to go. The problem comes when the IP changes, your service 
> is still the same, but you based your ID on something which is not a stable 
> identifier.
>
> This is of course also all a similar problem with Multihoming and Mobility 
> etc. One day you are IP X the other moment you are IP Z.
>
> The real way to solve this is the Identity layer, and HIP provides just 
> that.

Some 10+ years ago, SNMP decoupled the identity of an SNMP service
from the transport used to access the service by introducing the
notion of an engineID. It was architecturally the right thing to
do. At that time, people hoped that management applications would at
start using engineIDs since they are architecturally the right thing
to deal with proxies, NATs and all sort of issues. Ten years later, we
must simply observe that this did not happen. Perhaps HIP as a more
general solution to this problem has more luck.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>