DC-Nets and IP addresses

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

   I've been arguing that DC-Nets are among the crypto protocols that
   we've not exploited much so far. I was working on an
   implementation, till I got stuck with the 'net' part of it.

Speaking of long-term integration on the internet, might it not be a
good idea to get some IP address range assigned for dc-net use?  

To integrate with the rest of the Internet, there should be some IP
address that this message appears to originate from.  These are the
addresses that need reservation.  

Class A,B,C addresses are the standard unicast addresses for network
interfaces.  Class D addresses are multicast addresses.  Class E
addresses are reserved; there are 27 bits of address space available.
If we could reserve some 11 bit prefix of this address space, that
would leave us with 16 bits of address for dc-net addresses.  This
will certainly suffice until the new IP is fully deployed.

As far as social mechanisms go, how does one go about reserving some
prefix of the Class E address space?  Could our resident IETF gurus
comment, please?

Very Simple Review: To send one message, (1) a group of people make a
bunch of bilateral communications.  (2) Each person publishes the sum
of all the messages the receive.  (3) The sum of all the broadcasts in
item (2) is the message.

There are a bunch of integration issues to deal with as well.

For communication internal to the dc-net, i.e. from one member to
another, a Class D multicast address will suffice.  All the dc-net
members would be members of the multicast group, and any of them could
reconstruct a message.

Communication from the dc-net to the rest of the internet is the
problem.  How does someone send a message into the dc-net?  How does
the dc-net send a message outside itself?  How do you properly do
name service?

For sending a message into the dc-net, a message directly posted from
the outside to the internal multicast address for the dc-net would
suffice.  But most systems can't route to a Class D address yet.
Sending a message from the dc-net should appear, in an ideal world, to
originate from the Class E address for the dc-net, but the same
routing problem is even worse here.

Unicast proxy addresses for the net solve both of these.  By using
multiple loopback interfaces, you can given a machine on the Internet
more IP addresses than it has physical interfaces.  That is, if a
single machine has only an ethernet connection, adding two loopback
interfaces could give that machine three IP addresses.  These extra IP
addresses can be used as proxy addresses.

These proxy sites would have to be trusted at least against denial of
service.  If one assumes higher level authentication and integrity
checking, alterations in the message stream by the proxy can be
detected.  Failure recovery could then include choice of a new proxy
or reconfiguration of the dc-net.

I can't really comment now on how might a proper long term solution
might work.  One would at least keep the proxy addresses for backward
compatibility, since it's unlikely for many years to have direct
support for dc-nets shipped as standard kernel features, although that
_is_ the eventual goal.  It's likely that the protocols for
discovering and joining multicast groups, as one example of an
aggregate addressed entity, will apply here.

Eric