nanog mailing list archives
Re: Blockchain and Networking
From: Peter Kristolaitis <alter3d () alter3d ca>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2018 01:59:11 -0500
On 2018-01-08 12:52 AM, William Herrin wrote:
I'm having trouble envisioning a scenario where blockchain does that any better than plain old PKI. Blockchain is great at proving chain of custody, but when do you need to do that in computer networking? Regards, Bill Herrin
There's probably some potential in using a blockchain for things like configuration management. You can authenticate who made what change and when (granted, we can kinda-sorta do this already with the various authentication and logging mechanisms, but the blockchain is an immutable, permanent record inherently required for the system to work at all).
That immutable, sequenced chain of events would let you do things like "make my test environment look like production did last Thursday at 9AM" trivially by reading the blockchain up until that timestamp, then running a fork of the chain for the new test environment to track its own changes during testing.
Or when you know you did something 2 months ago for client A, and you need your new NOC guy to now do it for client B -- the blockchain becomes the documentation of what was done.
We can build all of the above in other ways today, of course. But there's certainly something to be said for a vendor-supported solution that is inherent in the platform and requires no additional infrastructure. Whether or not that's worth the complexities of managing a blockchain on networking devices is, perhaps, a whole other discussion. :)
- Peter
Current thread:
- Blockchain and Networking Glen Kent (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Hugo Slabbert (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking chris (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking William Herrin (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Peter Kristolaitis (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Denys Fedoryshchenko (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Jörg Kost (Jan 08)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking John Levine (Jan 08)
- Message not available
- Re: Blockchain and Networking John R. Levine (Jan 08)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking William Herrin (Jan 09)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Christopher Morrow (Jan 09)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Jimmy Hess (Jan 23)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Brock Tice (Jan 23)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking John R. Levine (Jan 23)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Jimmy Hess (Jan 23)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Peter Kristolaitis (Jan 07)
- Re: Blockchain and Networking Hugo Slabbert (Jan 07)