Subject: Re: A challenge

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 10:22:53 -0700

the article from the cellphone manufactors .... that it was less expensive
to provide a mechanism to save the current personality and load it into a
new phone than it was to manufactor the slot for the smartcard reader
interface ... with a overall infrastructure cost savings. the corresponding
assertion was that the current smartcard & smartcard interface was as
inexpensive as it was because of the significant investment that was made
for generic, unbiquitous smartcard use .... not solely restricted to
cellphone personabilities. and finally people could use the personality
save/restore to address issue where the smartcard is lost/stolen/damaged.

My other assertion was that the existing operation may linger for some time
.... since the original smartcard investment has appeared to be written off
.... and smartcard use can essentially be had for a few cents on the
dollar. The transition to save/restore requires new investment in the
save/restore infrastructure .... which means that the cost savings in
eliminating the smartcard reader in cellphones would have to cover the
save/restore infrastructure investment (and/or people find the additional
benefit of having lost/stolen/damaged coverage).

Note that the cost savings of using a common smartcard infrastructure is so
great that the cellphones and the simms share the same manufactoring
components .... down to simms being manufactored as smartcards ... and then
the simms punched out of the plastic smartcard form factor. If the other
uses of smartcards migrate to various contactless/wireless paradigms for
various reasons .... that could mean that cellphone market segment would
carry more of the smartcard infrastructure costs (even at a few more cents
on the dollar) making it easier to justify the funding of a save/restore
infrastructure transition.

I didn't say smartcards were wrong.  I said that they had a design point
based on the technology from the '80s ... and that changed by the early
'90s .... effectively making the technology assumptions and requirements
from the '80s no longer valid.

I wasn't making them (OSI comments) very load in 1983 ... I was doing some
other things, although there were jokes about OSI being from pre-1970s,
telco, point-to-point copper, high error rate, low bandwidth design point
"people" ... aka by the time OSI standard was passed it was also obsolete.
While i was doing a little tcp/ip stuff in the 1983 era .... it wasn't a
primary focus and I didn't get involved into any OSI issues into slightly
later.

I was starting to get more vocal about OSI by possible 1985 .... I was
starting to  become more vocal about it.  By interop '88 I was pretty vocal
.... there were all these things in there with OSI, x.400, complex
monitoring. One of the things at interop '88 ... i would guess that there
was even some significant percentage of the IETF community was supporting
various of the alternate candidates to SNMP. I had a couple workstations in
booth kiddy-corner from the booth where case was "officially" located ...
and was able to get Case to install SNMP on the workstations to demo ....
even tho large portions of the rest of the booths had various SNMP
alternatives. I was also on the XTP technical advisory board and working on
HSP. The majority of the people in X3S3.3 were giving us really bad time
because X3S3.3 had responsibility for standards related to OSI levels 3&4
... and the official charter is that you can't have standards that violate
OSI levels 3&4. My response was 1) ISO & ANSI are already totally
schizophrenic because ethernet standard thru IEEE and recognized as
standard at ISO combined levels 1, 2, and part of 3 ... i.e. the MAC
interface includes a portion of routing from level 3.  HSP was going to go
directly from transpart/level4 to LAN interface in the middle of level3.
Core X3S3.3 basically said that you couldn't have protocol standard work in
X3S3.3 that specified an interface to MAC/LAN .... because that violated
OSI. I've had more than a few choice words about gosip also.

slightly related .... my wife and I were operating a backbone at the time
of NSFNET1/T1 bid ... and weren't allowed to bid ... but a NSF audit of our
backbone claimed it was at least five years ahead of all the NSFNET1/T1
bids to build something new. We were also doing some
interesting/non-traditional things with crypto at the time ... but that is
another story. However we did come up also with 3-layer architecture ....
somewhat grew out of a response that my wife wrote and presented to a
certain TLA gov agency RFI for enterprise distributed computing
environment. That got us into trouble from various factions that were
trying to put the client/server genie back into the bottle:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#3tier

OSI was possibly a bad choice to choose as an example.  However, something
that I was really agitated about in the early 1980s time-frame was that the
traditional mainframe computing environment was starting to commoditize
.... first with mid-range computers and then with PCs and workstations.
Maybe another example is this thing called electronic commerce.

lots of threads related to OSI "blech":
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#xtphsp

some recent discussions about interop '88
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#interop

past threads about high speed networking in the '80s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet

random past specific mentions regarding gosip:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#114 What is the use of OSI Reference
Model?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#115 What is the use of OSI Reference
Model?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#0 "Mainframe" Usage
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#59 7 layers to a program
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000b.html#79 "Database" term ok for plain
files?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#16 The author Ronda Hauben fights
for our freedom.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#43 Al Gore: Inventing the
Internet...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#63 Is Al Gore The Father of the
Internet?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#70 When the Internet went private
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#17 Pre ARPAnet email?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001e.html#32 Blame it all on Microsoft
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#5 YKYGOW...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001i.html#6 YKYGOW...
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#21 Why did OSI fail compared with
TCP-IP?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002g.html#30 Why did OSI fail compared with
TCP-IP?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002i.html#15 Al Gore and the Internet
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002m.html#59 The next big things that weren't
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002n.html#42 Help! Good protocol for national
ID card?

--
Internet trivia, 20th anv: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm

Al Arsenault <[email-masked]> on 2/13/2003 5:43 am wrote:

Lynn,

    Interesting message from you, as always.  Fascinating predictions on
the
future.  Only a few issues need to be raised, IMHO.  :-)

    One of those issues relates to the whole "secure backup and restore" or
"secure download" of credentials. That's currently an unsolved problem.
Fortunately, IETF has a working group - SACRED - addressing that issue.
While SACRED started out a couple of years ago with a lot of interest and
enthusiasm, interest seems to have waned.  There are only a few people
actively participating, and the group is about to wrap up with its
solution.
While I am others hope that the proposed solution will succeed and solve
parts of the problem, it's not a complete solution (e.g., it addresses only
device - credential server interactions; it doesn't support device - device
operation).  So consider this message a plea for others interested in this
area to get involved in this work.

    Until SACRED or some similar solution becomes widely implemented,
smartcards - e.g., SIMs or WIMs in phones - aren't going away.  The
business
model in many parts of the world relies on a large number of customers
replacing their handsets frequently.  In many areas I'm familiar with, it's
common for a large set of people to replace their handsets every few
months,
so that they always have the latest, smallest, most colorful, "coolest"
device.  The whole notion of a smart card supports this model, by allowing
the user to get a new handset and dispose of the old one while maintaining
the same service WITHOUT INTERACTING with the mobile operator, because
those
interactions with the carbon-based life forms who staff the operator
outlets
represent one of the highest costs in the system. With a SIM/Smart card
that
can be moved from one handset to another, there's no need to involve any
other carbon-based life form. Since there's now no way to securely move the
credentials electronically that's widely interoperable (lots of us have our
own, somewhat proprietary schemes), for most mobile operators/service
providers the smart card remains the method of choice.

    An automated - read as "efficient and low cost" way to securely
register
new devices into the system is also a requirement, and it's also currently
an unsolved problem.  Oh, there are other standards groups working on it,
but I'm not sure they're going to have good solutions any time soon.

    So it's nice to sit here and make statements that "this technology was
just wrong, and 20 years from now everyone will acknowledge that it's
obvious", but tell me Lynn, how many statements about ISO vs. TCP/IP did
you
make in 1983?

        Al Arsenault
        Diversinet Corp.