[Ndn-interest] NDN Packet Format

Michael Weiss wm at ars.is
Sun Dec 15 05:25:48 PST 2013


Hello Lixia,

On 09.12.2013, at 05:10, Lixia Zhang <lixia at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:

> hmm, not sure I fully understand the implication of this comment.
> the current encoding allows the length field to go up to 8 bytes (for a value field up to 2^64 byte = 1.8X10^19), are you thinking this is not adequate for reasonable future?

I don’t see objects of that size passed over a wire but the Petabyte article on wikipedia already lists collections exceeding 10^17 bytes and somebody might want to define an object of that size to represent a snapshot. At least for software based implementations 128 bit length fields would be cheap within the proposed encoding, but I agree that objects beyond 2^64 octets is deep inside the land of “somebody else’s problem” and are VERY unlikely to ever hit a router.

>> Interest packet: I have not thought too hard about the computational implications on this one but in general, I'd prefer to have all required fields before the optional fields and thus move to the nonce right after the name and before the selectors.
> 
> we discussed that option earlier, however people more familiar with implementation argued that the selector fields should go first to ease the lookup (e.g. do a hash of name+selector as a lookup key)

With hashing in mind, that makes sense.

> digest can certainly prevent collisions, but given that NDN uses hierarchically structured names including key names, I would like to better understand your scenarios of possible key name collisions first, if you dont mind elaborate a bit.

I now realize that I did not distinguish between PublisherPublicKeyLocator in Interests and KeyLocator in data packets. Should those two have the same type?
I was thinking about generic namespaces like /User or key names without properly versioned names, which would require a series of of interests with exclude filters but I came to the conclusion that the keyspace must be reachable along the path that data travels anyway and that issue is external to the packet format. However, I still think it makes sense to include the digest and require to generate interests for keys with MaxSuffixComponents set to 0 for data validation.
Somehow, I find the issue difficult to discuss on a packet level. Intuitively, the signature and the signing keys are valid for all eternity (while trust in signatures decays). Names on the other hand are rather more fluid and runtime-dependent. It is still possible to represent immutable data in a mutable namespace. For public data one could pick a prefix that specifies an algorithm to derive the signing key from the data bits, for example.
Another simple solution to retrieve keys would be to distinguish keys from data as is done in the ContentType field and use that in interests.

> this is an interesting suggestion. I think it assumes that some a prior steps already occurred that provided one with the keybits of a trusted key.

The idea is to bundle the public key with the signature to have everything for verification without additional lookups. For large objets with a long lifetime that should be a reasonable thing to do. The CCN documentation also mentions this possibility to use short keys based on elliptic curve cryptography but discarded that solution because of longer verification times. The benchmarks (http://bench.cr.yp.to/results-sign.html) show a slowdown of roughly a factor of 2 compared to RSA (ronald3072 vs ed25519) on a comparable security level.
As far as trust is concerned one should try to pass keys as early as possible, which is an interesting topic for URI design and maybe the ability to encode Selectors in URIs could be useful.

> another interesting idea. My thought:
> 1/ yes the type definition requires agreement, but so does protocols with precise fields on each level and their order, right?

Right. No matter which way, one needs to agree on types and their representation and primitive types like unsigned integers or words of various lengths certainly warrant global agreement. The 0.1 spec also defines field order for reasons of performance, i guess.

> 2/ as the 0.1 spec stated, the choice of TLV format is for its flexibility in adding new types and phasing out old types as the protocol evolves over time. a precisely defined protocol would not support incremental changes, right?

Right. Changes to a protocol would (and in my opinion must) constitute a new protocol. This sounds rather rigid but can support evolution if there are mechanisms to negotiate endpoints with different protocols. In NDN it is straightforward to talk about different versions of a protocol simply by naming.
Pseudo examples:
(/ndn/prot/transport/tcp/ver1 ((/ietf/ipv4 1.2.3.4) (/ietf/tcp 9393)))
(/ndn/prot/fragmentation/DelayedAuthentication ((ietf/ipv4 1.2.3.4) (/ietf/udp 22222)))
Components could then ask a trusted software provider for an implementation and start using it. Similarly one could define families of protocols that are parameterized by field lengths or cryptographic algorithms.

>> On a more practical note, my suggestion for such a format is to use Variable Length Values as used by MIDI for length fields, meaning one continuation bit and 7 bits of data in each octet in whatever bit and byte order the signaling folks among you favour. The minimum number of octets MUST be used to ensure uniqueness of representation. The null byte could then be used to represent omitted optional fields.
> 
> we also considered this encoding format earlier, but rejected it due to the processing (which might not best fit hardwire implementations)

That was my guess but, I also guessed that the continuation bits for expected sizes could be hardwired and then use the next continuation bit to signal hand-off to software, but my knowledge of electrical engineering is weak.

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