more on 20 YEARS - ONE STANDARD: The Story of TCP/IP

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2003 22:42:23 -0800 (PST)
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] 20 YEARS - ONE STANDARD: The Story of TCP/IP

On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, Dave Farber wrote:

> Subject: 20 YEARS - ONE STANDARD: The Story of TCP/IP

> In recognition of TCP/IP's 20th, we prepared this short history, which may
> be of interest to IP readers.
> Jonathan B. Spira

I believe that this "story of TCP/IP" is missing a few chapters....

> In 1977, BBN used TCP for the very first time on a UNIX system.

What happened to the implementations on other platforms, particularly
things like Multics and Tenex?  And what about the early implementations
such as (I hear) by people like Yogan Dalal and the folks at the
University of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana)?

> In 1978, Cert, Jon Postel (1948-1998), then Director of the University
> of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (ISI), Computer
> Networks Division, and Dany Cohen, in a meeting at ISI, decided to split
> TCP into two separate protocols.  The result was TCP and the Internet
> Protocol (IP)....

This idea of splitting out an explicit datagram layer from early-TCP was
floating aroung for a long time before 1978.  I know that I worked on it
in the 1974/1975 period when dealing with security and encryption issues.
For example, on my website I have a photo taken on the night of December
31, 1974 when I and several others worked on some ideas about squeezing an
encryption layer above the nascent IP and below TCP. See
http://www.cavebear.com/cavebear/photos/tcpip.gif


> By then, vendors such as Xerox and 3Com were getting on the TCP/IP
> bandwagon, although some experts were cautioning that mainframe operating
> systems from IBM and other major vendors were "too complex" for TCP/IP to
> be added in a cost-effective manner.

One should not forget that there were TCP/IP capabilities for mainframes
relatively early on - talk to folks like Bob Braden and the folks from ACC
(Santa Barbara) [ACC has stood for various things throughout the years.]

One should not forget the work done at UC Berkeley - the BSD train - that
lead to much of the code used in the internet today.

And at the small-machine end of the scale, we should remember the work
of folks like Romkey and Bridgham at MIT under Saltzer and Clark in the
early 1980's.

> Postel had a very long-term outlook for the "new" ARPANET.  He also knew
> that many developers might be tempted to advance short term goals at the
> cost of long-term growth.  His caution still rings true today:
>
>      There are some very tempting shortcuts in the implementation of IP
>      and TCP.  DO NOT BE TEMPTED!  Others have and they have been
>      caught!

The wisdom the quoted warning still rings very true - a large number of
TCP/IP based products on the net today do not cover all the bases and, as
we see from the troubling number of sucessful penetrations, are
significantly undertested except under the most commonly occurring
conditions.  Today's systems are often vulnerable to attacks that exercise
undertested code pathways.

Indeed, my own sense is that until we improve the quality of
implementations (and retire the old implementations from service) that the
net will increasingly become a house of cards susceptable to denial of
service attacks.  Yet with the decrease in price of network equipment,
there is economic pressure on manufacturers of new equpment to minimize
needed testing and ship products as soon as they work in the lab.


> The secret of the Internet's success was its adherence to standards

I disagree - if "adherence to standards" were the cause of the Internet's
sucess, we would all be communicating using ISO/OSI protocols.

The internet is a testimony to the power of iconoclastic thinking - and of
a healthy iteration of thinking and implementation on the way to a
sucessful blend of imagination and engineering.

        --karl--



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