Duncan Frissell writes:
At 12:38 PM 4/9/96 -0500, Scott Brickner wrote:
Wait a second. I don't know that it's really as impossible as you think. Given the CDA advocates' hypothesis that anonymity is a Bad Thing (tm), it's reasonable for them to assume that the ISP can arrange to have a policy requiring that it know who's making the SLIP/PPP connection. It's not too hard to have *every* packet generated by a given connection flagged with an IP option indicating "adult" or "minor".
Of course that doesn't overcome the "technical problem" of getting the IETF to adopt that change in the protocols and getting a significant number of sites to adopt the new protocol. Even if you impose a substitutte on the IETF, it doesn't stop them from wandering off and creating their independent protocols and seeing whether the "official" or the "unofficial" get adopted.
Actually, the IP layer specifies "options", but doesn't use all of them. I think undefined options aren't interpreted by the router, except to observe the "copy on fragment" bit's setting. Even if they are, using the existing "security compartment" instead of defining a new option could do the same thing. Using security compartment might permit the use of existing equipment everywhere, making the transition to this scheme require only reconfiguration of a subset of existing routers. IPv4 is so stable now that adopting a new option is *very* unlikely to break anything in existing routers. Let's say that option class 1 (currently unused) is used for the information. Option number 1 means "adult", option number 2 means "not adult". Neither option requires parameters, so they only mean one more octet per packet (13 if security compartment is used). The "copy on fragment" bit is set in both. Now, let's assume the worst: the CDA is upheld through a few of these court cases. The IETF's raison d'etre is to facilitate usage of the Internet, privacy isn't a goal per se. With all the US members scrambling to figure out how to cope with CDA, *many* of the members might consider something like this to be a relatively easy protocol fix. Routers that don't accept packets directly from customers will already work fine. At the borders of autonomous systems, system owners may categorize each link as "adult", "non adult", or "unspecified". "Unspecified" means they can use an existing router, and assumes that the other end bears responsibility for having the right "adulthood" option. For "adult" or "non adult", they need a router with software modified to put the right option in all packets. For switched connections, like SLIP or PPP, the router needs to know who's on the other end and put the appropriate options in the packets. Ultimately, a relatively small number of network components need to be changed, and almost all of them may be changed through fairly simple software updates. Still think the IETF would refuse?