Subject: [hrpc] Bottom up approach...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 12:55:42 -0400

Focusing on mechanism not policy:

Ultimately there are only about 7 layers in the popular OSI 7 layer
stack model, only three or four layers in rehashes for the IETF
protocols. Any mitigation mechanism is going to live in one or more of
those layers.

One can probably eliminate some of those layers as potential
mitigators for practical reasons*, but it's still not much.

Some layers are rather limited horizontally in practice. We have IP
(and ICMP) and just above it TCP, UDP, and not a lot else until we get
higher up.

The routing layer is critical though also somewhat limited in scope,
BGP and a few other methods mostly used internally (IS-IS, RIP, etc.)

The horizontally vast layer is the application layer many of which
float on one or more transport layers special to the application. For
example the web largely floats on HTTP(S). And there's DNS.

But I think one could make a 98% bullet list on a single sheet of
paper.

That's your knobs and buttons.

The rest is largely policy, how shall they be used specifically.

* For example is the link layer useful? Perhaps it has an anonymity
and security component but it's not generally used outside of LANs
other than virtually in specialized applications or inasmuch as its
data leaks into other layers.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | [email-masked]             | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD       | 800-THE-WRLD
The World: Since 1989  | A Public Information Utility | *oo*

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From: Nalini J Elkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 19:33:19 +0000 (UTC)

>those layers 

I like your approach.  I have had people discuss with me privately as to whether there 
are actual protocol implications of this topic.   I would say, definitely. 

Let's take for example, the often cited "end-to-end principle" or RFC3724. 

One of the consequences of the end-to-end principle is to disproportionately give 
advantage to the endpoints.   Who wins by this?   Is this not conducive to 
centralization of power? 

One might ask the same questions of DNS over HTTPS? 

Wars are about territory.  Who is it that more and more has control over what 
happens? 

Thanks,

Nalini Elkins
CEO and Founder
Inside Products, Inc.
www.insidethestack.com
(831) 659-8360

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From: Tony Rutkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 16:10:43 -0400

+1

Nalini, perhaps public end users can be considered in this power
equation (considering this is hrpc).  The end-to-end principal in
today's world means the end-user is left holding the bag in defending
her/him/itself against anyone and everyone in the world.  So how exactly
does that further human rights? (As opposed to mass exploitation by
anyone with the resources.)

As a practical matter, the massive available middlebox metrics
measurements make it clear that the end-to-end principal is a myth
belongs up there with the Easter Bunny - when the Bunny was DOD and
NSF.  Real world public internets are different. 

However the question remains - who helps mitigate human rights
exploitation of end users?

--tony

On 27-Aug-18 3:33 PM, Nalini J Elkins wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> hrpc mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/hrpc

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 16:17:10 -0400

> advantage to the endpoints.   Who wins by this?   Is this not conducive to 

Not intrinsically, no.  On the contrary, it is a means of
_de_centralizing power, if the conditions are right.  That is, it
seems fair to observe, what we actually witnessed during some periods
of Internet development.

But of course, it will not prevent the concentration of power by
magic, either.  If a very large number of endpoints are controlled
somehow by the same organization or if virtually everyone chooses to
engage with a "single endpoint" (appropriately provisioned technically
so that this is possible), that has consequences on (at least some of)
those involved in the interaction.  I find it rather difficult to see
how substituting the power of some outsize controller out at the end
of the network with the power of some outsize controller in the middle
of the network is going to make any of this better.

As an aside, I will also note that the "end to end principle" as
originally articulated was not a political choice to
"disproprortionately advantage" anyone.  What that paper describes is
a _technical_ architecture designed to produce certain technical
advantages in systems design.  There might be knock-on social,
political, or even legal effects, but that was not the design goal in
the argument.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 16:33:14 -0400

I lean more towards empowering the individual to control what they
receive on the net, particularly in a technical way.

A big exception is in the realm of what third-parties do with your
information.

That can be mitigated by anonymity and otherwise withholding personal
data but only to a limited extent outside of not participating at all.

For example you will probably have to identify yourself in quite a bit
of detail to your bank in order to do online banking. What they do
with that information is, other than regulation and law, outside of
your control. And similar for many other network applications.

There are pre-network precedents but we go into the realm of when
quantity becomes quality. For example my bank can probably know that
as I check my balance I am logged into Facebook and indeed oftentimes
when I check the price on something online completely outside of the
realm of facebook, for example a price on Amazon, I often get an ad
for that item within minutes in my facebook feed. Any precedent to
that is at best a weak analogy. And micro-targeting in general.

And of course that which is imposed on one by outside forces such as
government censorship or even social media site policies.

But it's another way to divide up the problem: Is this something one
could control, such as not viewing content they find offensive and
support for tools to accomplish that, or is it something (perhaps
practically) out of their control.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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From: Nalini J Elkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:38:00 +0000 (UTC)

Andrew,
> If a very large number of endpoints are controlled somehow by the same organization> or if virtually everyone chooses to engage with a "single endpoint" 

Google is probably the de facto search engine for many.    As you yourself point out,web platforms tend towards a "natural monopoly".   I do not know if you intendedto include Google as a platform.   One can certainly give other examples.  I do notmean to pick on Google exclusively.

>  I find it rather difficult to see how substituting the power of some outsize controller> out at the end of the network with the power of some outsize controller in the middle> of the network is going to make any of this better.

That was not my suggestion.  I would advocate for multiple controllers with maybenot as much power.  In fact, I would say that in the business world, we haveanti-trust legislation for just that purpose.  To prevent the monopoly and " toobig to fail" kind of scenario.
I would advocate for innovation and for maintaining an appropriate andlively innovation eco-system.  That is, having two people in a garagedeveloping products (both endpoint and network based), small companies,mid-sized companies, and so on. 

> As an aside, I will also note that the "end to end principle" as> originally articulated was not a political choice to> "disproprortionately advantage" anyone.  What that paper describes is> a _technical_ architecture designed to produce certain technical> advantages in systems design.  

I am not impugning anyone's motives.   There are, however, unintendedconsequences to actions.  We need to carefully consider all of them andnot think only of the positive results. 
 Thanks,

Nalini Elkins
CEO and Founder
Inside Products, Inc.
www.insidethestack.com
(831) 659-8360

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 16:59:31 -0400

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 08:38:00PM +0000, Nalini J Elkins wrote:
> web platforms tend towards a "natural monopoly".   I do not know if you
> intended
> to include Google as a platform.   One can certainly give other examples.  I do
> not
> mean to pick on Google exclusively.

Google is not, I would say, a web application of the sort I was
talking about, though maybe the Google Analytics engine and the entire
supporting infrastructure that goes along with it is such an
application.  The key property I'm trying to delineate is an
application that sits on the web, but that doesn't really use it.
Google-qua-search-engine is emphatically part of the web, and so it's
a protcol-based application: it relies on links and sends you all over
the Internet seeking your stuff.  It doesn't rely on you consuming
Google products to work at all. (That could change, of course, but
it's how it is today.)  But because they are so large and it's very
difficult to avoid their analytic gaze, _maybe_ the whole environment
has the same properties.

Contrast this with the nature of true web applications, which are
most of the social media systems.  They basically never send you out
of the web application environment to some other resource on the web.
This is because the way they work is by keeping you _in_ the
environment, delivering the content in a way that is automatically
adjusted according to what you were attempting to get out of the
application (possibly modified according to imperatives of the
application-delivering organization).  We can think of them as "on"
the Internet without being "part of" the Internet.  

> not as much power.  In fact, I would say that in the business world, we have
> anti-trust legislation for just that purpose.  To prevent the monopoly and "
> too
> big to fail" kind of scenario.

This is why I suggested somewhere upthread that these questions might
be entirely social, and the purpose of the analogy with railroad
networks.  Supposing that anti-trust legislation applies in these
cases, there is effectively no technical component to that.  It is
worth thinking about the consequences, however.  One can argue that GM
failed during the 2000s in part because of its defensive moves aimed
to avoid the negative consequences of anti-trust enforcement.  

> I am not impugning anyone's motives.   There are, however, unintended
> consequences to actions.  We need to carefully consider all of them and
> not think only of the positive results.

Sure.  But that cuts in every direction.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

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From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 03:36:02 +0100

Hiya,

(First, thanks Andrew for disputing what I consider the generally
arm-waving arguments of your disputants.)

On 27/08/18 21:17, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> those involved in the interaction.  

So, I think I agree that there is nothing inherently centralising
in the end-to-end argument. However, it may well be that a re-reading
of the original paper [1] considering today's reality of leviathans
like google, FB, comcast and the NSA, all of whom have a bunch of
common features, (*) may show up interesting things that were not
considered as part of the end-to-end argument. (TBH, I've not gone
and checked if someone's already done that analysis, so apologies
for the missing reference if this has already been done.)

For example, [1] says: "If we assume further that all these threats
are relatively low in probability – low enough  that  the system
allows  useful  work  to  be  accomplished  –  brute  force
countermeasures such as doing everything three times appear
uneconomical." The not-considered issue there is perhaps that in
today's networks, various entities are capable of mounting some
attacks at such scale that perhaps "doing everything three times"
is now the best bet. IOW, there are now some potentially-bad
actors who could act badly (at *huge* scale) and yet still allow
"useful work to be accomplished." So, I think today's end-point
reality may be sufficiently far from that of 1981 to invalidate
some of the arguments in, or conclusions of, [1]. (Many of the
arguments and conclusions of [1] would, I think, survive just
fine today - so I'm by no means "against" the end-to-end
argument, in fact, I think it's an excellent bit of lasting
work, and the cause of loads of interesting things, but I do
not think of [1] as an equivalent of the 10 commandments:-)

More generally, what [1] calls "low level" (usually interpreted in
OSI stack layers) could maybe (**) be usefully interpreted today
as meaning "on many paths" which in turn could cast the end-to-end
argument in a different light. Roughly, we could interpret the
user agents of the users of gmail as being the relevant endpoints
and not the gmail web/mall servers. With that interpretation the
HTTP cookies used by gmail for good or ill become "in-network"
artefacts and not end-point artefacts. There's a further weakness
in my argument though in that the gmail web/mail server operator is
the same entity that implements the user agent in very many cases,
so maybe we need to consider a form of the end-to-end argument that
stretches beyond the keyboard to the warm bodies? Say with an
argument that the user agent ought act on the user's behalf and
not on behalf of the implementer of the UA. If that last principle
were followed, I guess a diligent implementer of a generic UA would
make frequent reference to the UDHR and similar to document what
they have chosen to implement. (And e.g. would never deliberately
make the default UA profile be anything other than the most
privacy-friendly profile possible).

So perhaps one could argue that one (by no means uniquely) useful
interpretation of the end-to-end argument might consider the human
rights of those warm bodies as being a relevant aspect of the
end-points in the argument. (Without though assuming any policy
agreement at all between the humans at the end-points!)

I think there could be useful studies to be done along those lines.
Today's threads however seem neither useful nor studious so far,
mainly due to arm-waving, (not excluding this mail;-)

Lastly, a good few of the things about which folks say they are
uneasy seem to me to both valid concerns and almost nothing to do
with HR, nor in some cases with IRTF/IETF/networking. So this
doesn't seem to me a good venue for productive discussion of many
recently-raised points. Perhaps it'd help me understand better if
people explicitly said how their arguments related to networking
and HR and were in-scope for HRPC or the IRTF/IETF?

Cheers,
S.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf

(*) Another potentially fun speculation - what'd Hobbes have thought
of Google, FB, comcast, the NSA and their ilk? :-)

(**) I'm not claiming this is true, just wondering - that *maybe*
is a real one:-)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 22:40:48 -0400

My understanding of the end-to-end principle is simply that every node
whether it's run by Google or J Alfred Prufrock is essentially
equivalent in logical networking capabilities.

Importantly it means that J Alfred can run a server.

For example, J can run a search engine just like Google's (other than
scale etc) from the system in their living room or even a smart phone.

The net's architecture won't stop you.

This is critical to "permission-free innovation" (sometimes
"permissionless innovation".)

Compare and contrast to networks at the time of the IETF internet's
design such as IBM's SNA.

With SNA you were specifically assigned the role of client or server,

There was no pretense of symmetricity.

"Violations" of the end to end principle abound. For example NAT where
your host address keeps changing typically via several hour contracts.

And often last-mile providers just outright block inbound well-known
ports such as port 80 (HTTP/Web servers) and port 25 (SMTP.)

There are workarounds in most every case, e.g., dynamic DNS which can
change what your host is bound to in lockstep with your IP address
contracts. And people learn to use ports other than well-known. Some
of it may be rocket science sometimes but it's only rocket science,
really not that complicated.

I refer to this behavior as:

  When caught in a trap an animal will gnaw off its leg to escape.

At best those "violations" are excused as "the cheap seats": The
providers want more money to allow you to run servers and by doing
hand-to-hand combat with the Buddha nature of the internet have found
ways to frustrate the average user.

But there's nothing INHERENT in the protocols per se which does this,
it's just a form of blocking and address management as proven by the
workarounds which also abound.

Thus, end to end, every host on the internet is in essence equal, even
if some are more equal than others.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:09:45 -0700

The end-to-end argument is stated twice in the 1984 paper, once in the abstract and once in the introduction. They differ in interesting ways.

> The principle, called the end-to-end argument, suggests that functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that low level.

> In reasoning about this choice, the requirements of the application provide the basis for a class of arguments, which go as follows: The function in question can completely and correctly be implemented only with the knowledge and help of the application standing at the end points of the communication system. Therefore, providing that questioned function as a feature of the communication system itself is not possible. (Sometimes an incomplete version of the function provided by the communication system may be useful as a performance enhancement.)

The amusing thing is that while the second is the one usually quoted, taken literally, it would indicate that Internet Routing, security functions such as TLS or IPsec, and end to end transport control such as carried out by TCP should not be carried out in the network, but rather done by every application.

From my perspective, the one in the abstract is far more useful, because it can be applied by comparison between any two layers. TCP was separated from IP in large part because IP was designed as a Best Effort service, and combining TCP into it turned it into something very much akin to the packet layer of X.25. We discarded LAPB in favor of unnumbered link layer services such as PPP, Frame Relay, ATM, Ethernet, and so on. But we do in fact retransmit in 802.11 and some other wireless link layers - because the value justifies the cost. And so on.

But the most important bit might be in the title. These are not an "end to end principle", as the robustness principle, the simplicity principle, or the coupling principle are; they are end-to-end *arguments*, and the paper points out that sometimes the argument fails.