Alternative DNS systems and net neutrality - Was: Re: [governance] DNSsec and allternative DNS system

[Karl Auerbach]

Ian Peter wrote:

> Although one of the sources of funding that provided for the ARPANet was the
> US military, we have to understand its origins as being in a cold war era
> when most US research funding was diverted through the military mechanisms.
> Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf were not military experts -rather they were engaged
> by universities where the tradition of making available publicly funded
> research was well established.

(Even though I worked right next to IMP #1 at UCLA during the late 
1960's I wasn't really paying attention to networking, much less funding 
- not the sort of thing an undergrad really cared about - we were most 
amused by the squealing noises coming from the radio perched on top of 
the IMP.)

But not that long afterwards...

My own work during the early 1970's was funded by the US military - via 
ARPA and other military bodies.  Vint Cerf was a paid consultant to our 
group at System Development Corp (SDC) - here's a photograph of some 
work he and I did on New Years eve 1974 dealing with injecting security 
into the then nascent TCP (no IP at that time) - 
http://www.cavebear.com/archive/cavebear/photos/tcpip.gif

The work that that blackboard represented was paid for by the US 
military and the results went to the US military establishment, not to 
the public except insofar as the military let us publish our results 
(sometimes yes, often not - indeed I got into a bit of warm water with 
one US three letter agency in 1978 when I published a letter in 
Communications of the ACM on the topic of computer network security.)

> If this had been a purely military project, it probably would have not seen
> the light of day.

Quite true.   In those days we did not think of nuclear war as an "if" 
but merely as a "when".  And in our network designs our model of failure 
of a computer or network switch (IMP) was vaporization.  So we 
considered the net to be something that was properly to be technology to 
be protected.

I did a lot of work on capability based operating systems (I designed 
and wrote some of the first operating systems that met formal, 
verifiable, and even provable security requirements, and I was really 
proud of my work on debugging technology for secure systems), work that 
was not classified, but like much of the good stuff of that era, kinda 
faded into oblivion.

And because the work of that era was recorded on paper, not digital 
media, it is not readily found on the net today.

For instance - where on the net is the original Cerf and Kahn paper on 
TCP?  (My paper copy has long since vanished.)

  But then, given the work going on in Europe and elsewhere
> on emerging network protocols, something would have emerged anyway and we
> would have called it the Internet (TCP/IP is not rocket science and its
> primary value is its universal adoption)

Back in those days those of us at SDC (System Development Corporation) 
and Rand Corp. had a hero - Louis Pouzin (who, I believe is on this 
discussion list).

Not enough credit is given to those who broke the circuit switching 
mentality - Pouzin, Don Davies, Paul Baran (did I spell that right?)

Based on what Louis P. wrote, David Kaufman, Frank Heinrich (one of Dave 
Farber's students from UC Irvine), and I at SDC developed a layering 
model for protocols either in advance of or in parallel with the split 
of IP off from TCP - our driving purpose was to insert a layer of 
end-to-end encryption on datagrams beneath the transport layer.

Until TCP our brains mainly conceived of transports as something 
HDLC-like.  The work of Cerf and Kahn was a significant mental 
breakthrough that showed us a whole new way of thinking.  Steps beyond 
TCP were quickly made - XNS had a lot of goodies that were superior to 
those in TCP and IP - and ISO/OSI was, to my mind, full of even more 
improvements [I do wish that IPv6 had adopted the 32-bit Fletcher 
checksum algorithm from OSI].  But TCP (and IP) stuck, the others withered.

		--karl--
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