[Ndn-interest] NDN protocol principles: no privacy?
Ralph Droms (rdroms)
rdroms at cisco.com
Sun Apr 3 06:21:40 PDT 2016
In the icnrg meeting, we didn't have time to discuss this sub-bullet of principle 2:
Although data packets are immutable, applications can make changes to the communicated content by creating new versions of immutable data packets.
I need help understanding how the phrase "new versions of immutable data packets" makes sense. "new version" and "immutable" seem contradictory. Jeff promised get me some help, here, if I moved the discussion to the mailing list.
- Ralph
> On Mar 15, 2016, at 1:01 AM 3/15/16, Marc.Mosko at parc.com wrote:
>
>
>> On Mar 14, 2016, at 8:44 PM, Tai-Lin Chu <tailinchu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> sure - I don't want to expose names that identify me, or expose my communication activities. given that, the "network" doesn't have the job of finding things for me by partial names - I only want to expose the details of my communication to a service that I have authenticated, and only when those details are encrypted. the "names" visible to the network in that sort of world just get the packets moving - and the only LPM needed is LPM in the FIB to get me to one or more instances of a service.
>>
>> Immutability is related to in-network discovery with LPM. If all packets are immutable, and there is no in-network discovery, ndn must rely on some other protocol that cannot not build on top of ndn for discovery (we should all agree that randomly guessing a version number or a certain name is not going to work well as “discovery”). This devalues ndn as an “universal" protocol.
>
> Could you please define immutable? Do you mean that a single publisher will never use the same name for different contents? Is that mandatory or enforceable? Or do you mean that there is some cryptographic function possible on a packet such that one can detect if it changes? Are those cryptographic primitives mandatory in each packet?
>
> I disagree that it is a necessary condition that one have name suffix completion matching of a data object to an interest to facilitate discovery. One can build a discovery protocol over exact name matching. I usually build these where the cache returns a chunked table of contents listing possible matches instead of the CCNx 0.x / NDN approach of having to return a (potentially very large) data object and walk a tree which is really only efficient if you expect what you want to be left-most or right-most child and not require iteration.
>
>
>>
>>
>>> On Mar 14, 2016, at 12:10 PM, Mark Stapp <mjs at cisco.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> interesting -
>>>
>>> On 3/14/16 11:27 AM, Burke, Jeff wrote:
>>>>
>>> [...]
>>> RFC 6973 takes a nice approach, for example, by offering
>>>>> definitions of some technical properties and mechanisms, but not trying
>>>>> to formulate an overall definition of "privacy".
>>>>
>>>> So I can try to understand your point here - do you agree with the
>>> authors that the primary privacy concerns are those of individuals? (Or,
>>> more generally, are corporations people here for this discussion - a
>>> more generic "data owner"?)
>>>>
>>>
>>> hmm - well, I don't think corporations are people, in the citizens united sense, but I think there's lots of commercial communication that needs to have the best possible protection, whether it's B2C or B2B?
>>>
>>>>> The editors there say
>>>>> that the body of the document, the discussion of the tradeoffs and
>>>>> alternatives, is the best way they could come up with to approach that
>>>>> abstraction. in practical terms, as you know well I think there's been
>>>>> an over-reliance on opportunistic caching in ICN generally, and as a
>>>>> result observability and correlation are defined to be positive
>>>>> properties of ICN communication rather than harmful ones.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Would I be correct to parse your concerns into two pieces that may
>>> have different implications:
>>>>
>>>> - Confidentiality of request (e.g., the consumer side)
>>>> - Confidentiality of publication (e.g., the publisher side)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think I have a mental image of "confidential request" - where an observer cannot see much beyond the routeable prefix needed to reach an instance of the service I want to communicate with. I'm not sure what "confidential publication" means, though? I think I want the replies to my requests to be encrypted with ephemeral, forward-secure key material, I don't want the names in the replies to expose any more than the names in the requests, and I want to be able to authenticate the service before I expose anything about my own identity or intentions. is that what you meant by "the publisher side"?
>>>
>>> [...]
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> most of these six "principles" sounded like "mechanisms" to me - the
>>>>> list felt like the end of a discussion about alternatives and the best
>>>>> ways to implement an architecture, rather than the start of one. it
>>>>> sounded like "we're tired of questions about LPM in the PIT, so we're
>>>>> going to stop calling that a possible mechanism and start calling it an
>>>>> inevitable, immutable, unquestionable 'principle'".
>>>>
>>>> Well, to take LPM for an example - it's actually not mentioned in
>>>> the
>>> principle doc that Alex sent. The principle I suspect that you are
>>> referring to is:
>>>>
>>>> [5] In-Network Name Discovery: Interests should be able use
>>>> incomplete
>>> names to retrieve data packets.
>>>> A consumer may not know the complete network-level name for data, as
>>> some parts of the name cannot be guessed, computed, or inferred
>>> beforehand. Once initial data is received, naming conventions can help
>>> determine complete names of other related data:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> * majority of interests will carry complete names
>>>>
>>>> * in-network name discovery expected to be used to bootstrap
>>> communication)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Can you explain your objection in these terms?
>>>>
>>>
>>> sure - I don't want to expose names that identify me, or expose my communication activities. given that, the "network" doesn't have the job of finding things for me by partial names - I only want to expose the details of my communication to a service that I have authenticated, and only when those details are encrypted. the "names" visible to the network in that sort of world just get the packets moving - and the only LPM needed is LPM in the FIB to get me to one or more instances of a service.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Mark
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>>
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