IPv8 Changes Everything We Know About IP

Key Takeaways

Did you know, because I bet you didn't, that basically anyone can submit a draft document to the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and it looks like a real proposal. It gets added onto the IETF website, and it's as real as any real proposal being made, because I certainly didn't. And before we get to the one I actually want to talk about, just to highlight exactly what I'm saying, we have this. Meow. Abstract. Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow And it just keeps doing that. That's That's That's the entire document. That's That's That's all of it. This is on the IETF website. This is a real proposal, but a bunch of people did not know about this, and this has led to some articles, which are very amusing. IPv8 draft proposes backwards compatible IPv4 evolution with integrated routing and security. There have been Reddit posts, there have been videos, there have been articles in various other languages like French, all taking this proposal entirely seriously. As you saw in the title there, Internet Protocol Version 8, IPv8. This is not real. Well, it's a real document. You can see it on the IETF website. But this is not a real proposal. The person who proposed it, not involved in the IETF, has never made a real proposal in their entire life, and this was discussed on the IETF mailing list. Is this some sort of April Fools' joke? This was submitted on April 14th, which is not April Fools' Day. But, it very well could be a late joke, or they just uh forgot to submit it earlier. Or, this could simply be somebody wanting to waste everybody's time and talk about some nonsense. Basically, no one involved in the IETF knows what this is, knows why it's here, has anything to do with it. This is not real. It's not happening. What somebody realized is how easy it is to submit a draft proposal, and that's probably something they should change. You shouldn't just be able to go and upload a proposal with basically no checks and balances in place. The fact this hasn't been abused more than it already has genuinely impressive. With all of that being said, let's take a look at this glorious proposal, because it's written in a way where you could think it's real if you look at certain parts of the document. But, then you read more of it. Internet Protocol Version 8, IPv8, is a managed network protocol that transforms how networks of every scale, from home networks to global internet, are operated, secured, and monitored. Every manageable element in an IPv8 network is authorized via OAuth 2 JWT tokens served from a local cache. This right here should immediately tell you this is utter garbage. This is utter nonsense. OAuth and Internet Protocol completely opposite ends of the Internet stack. That's not how this works. Let alone the fact that if you're, say, an embedded device, this massively increases the performance requirements needed to be able to exist. This just doesn't even make any sense as a proposal. I think the reason why some people think it is real is something I'll show you a little bit later. Every service a device requires is delivered in a single DHCP 8 lease response, which is another thing where um there's been a lot of effort to move away from DHCP as like a requirement, and this enforces DHCP once again. Every packet transitioning to the internet is validated at egress against DNS 8 lookup and a whois 8 registered active route. Network telemetry, authentication, name resolution, time synchronization, access control, and translation are unified into a single coherent zone server platform. IPv4 is a proper subset of IPv8, and IPv8 with the routing prefix field set to zero is an IPv4 address. No existing device, application, or network requires modification. The suite is 100% backward compatible. There is no flag day and no forced migration at any layer. If this is not setting off alarm bells, I know people read this like, "Oh my god. Oh my god, this is This is so cool." If this is not setting off alarm bells in anyone's head, I I I I don't I don't understand. IPv8 also resolves IPv4 address exhaustion. Each autonomous system number ASN holder receives 4,294,967,296 host addresses. The global routing table is structurally bound at one entry per ASN. Let me show you a big part of the reason I think people bought into this or wanted it to be true. That is the structure of an address. An IPv8 address is a 64-bit value r r r r n n n n with r r r r being the 32-bit ASN routing prefix and n n n n being the 32-bit host address with identical semantics to IPv4. If this first part here is set to 0000 Just saying not 00. Yeah. Yeah, I said I said I said 4 0. If that is set to that, then that represents something that is going to be an IPv4 address and only the second half is used for the address space for something IPv8, it uses the entire set of numbers. Packets with the first half being set to 0000 must be routed using standard IPv4 rules applied to the second half field. IPv4 is a proper subset of IPv8. No modification to IPv4 devices, applications, or networks is required. This sounds too good to be true. Because it is. Internal zone prefix, the 127.0.0.0.0/8 range of the r r r r field is permanently reserved for internal IPv8 zone prefixes. Internal zone prefixes identify network zones within an organization's private addressing space. I'm not going to read the entire document. We'll jump ahead a little bit to this right here. Routing peering prefix 100.0.0.0/8. This range of the r r r r field is permanently reserved for the regional internet work exchange routing peering fabric. Routing addresses are used exclusively for as-to-as peering link addressing at IXPs and private interconnect facilities. Full specification in routing. Now, this is where something gets very interesting. I was curious, what is Ryan? What is this do? Let me learn a bit more about this. Let's click on the link. It takes us down to the references, and Ryan is this one right here. As you might notice, Thane J, okay? Who is the author of this post? Thane J, or J Thane. Why is that interesting? Well, very simply, if we go to the link, the page isn't there. There's no page. That doesn't link out to anything. Now, this specification might have been deleted or something else like that, but if you have a reference which doesn't exist, that's already throwing up some alarm bells, and you might notice a lot of the things that this references are things by the same author. This entire IPv8 structure is written by a single person, a single person that nobody in the IETF knows, that nobody really understands what they're trying to do here. Again, this is obviously not real. On the note of these specs, if we go to some of them, we're going to notice that um, none of them exist. So, uh, all of these are just complete garbage references. But, let's go all the way up to the top again, cuz there's something I kind of skipped over. That is this here. This document is one of the companion specifications, and it has all of these right here. Now, some of these are linked to in the references on this page. At the bottom of the page that I was just showing you, others though, Wi-Fi 8 protocol. Now, Wi-Fi 8 is a real standard. Wi-Fi 8 is like it's like the latest version of Wi-Fi. It's 802.11bn, but draft thing Wi-Fi 8-00. I tried to search for this. This seems to be the only reference of this document on the entire internet. Talk about anything you want in this document, but the fact that there are fake references, fake things being linked to. This tells me that anybody praising this didn't actually read the document, didn't even like do a basic cursory glance at it. It's just oh, I'm afraid of hexadecimal, um that means this is better than IPv6. The document isn't all fake references. There are real references mixed in. So, you have things like network ingress filtering or autonomous system or JSON web token JWT. All of these completely real, but once you get to any of the references by the author of this document, it's all fake. Nothing is real whatsoever. Now, let's go and compare this to a real specification by real people. Let's go to IPv6. So, this was written by S. Deering of Xerox PARC and R. Hinden of Ypsilon Networks. Both of these, I don't know if this is still in business, but both of these are real places where real people worked. That's the other thing, right? I didn't actually show you this. This person is from One Limited. I tried to find One Limited. Uh there's a bunch of companies with a similar name, but nothing that seems at all related to somebody who might write a web spec. Let's go to the version that obsoleted this. So, this is RFC 2460, S. Deering of Cisco, A. Hind of Nokia. Let's go to any of the other ones here. Let's go 6564. S. Krishnan of Ericsson, J. Woodyatt of Apple, E. Kline of Google, J. Hoglund of Symantec, and Bhatia of Alcatel-Lucent. All of these real. Real people at real places. Better yet, all the references here also real references. If we go to any of these documents, these are real references by real authors, by people that actually have some sort of standing in web protocol development. Now, let's go back over to the mailing list and talk more about some of the problems. So, what do we get here? We get legacy applications can continue using IPv4 sockets, but only if they use the system DNS resolver, and we can continue using dot decimal notation instead of scary hex digits. Ooh, that hexadecimal, it's it's it's so scary. In exchange, we need to force everyone to adopt new network stacks for every operating system, a new DNS resolver in the OS which can manage prefixes for legacy applications, which is architecturally incompatible with how resolving works on Linux, significantly higher burdens on embedded device to speak IP, new incompatible firewalls, new incompatible proxies, new incompatible attributes for any protocol which transfers IP addresses, new routing metric which has not been used in any protocol before, new incompatible OSPF, that is open shortest path first, basically the way it routes around the network. New incompatible ISIS, that is your intermediate system to intermediate system. New BGP AFI, this is the BGP address family identifier used to identify individual network address schemes or numbering plans for network communication in context for the use of individual addresses might be otherwise ambitious. New DNS record type. New address space for IANA and RIRs to manage. New access control protocol, which is unlike any protocol we've seen before, and force the use of DHCP again, even though we have finally almost gotten rid of it. Compared to IPv6, even if fully implemented in every OS and client and router, the proposed protocol would still lack sufficient address space. If each ASN has one 32-bit address space, then an ISP who currently has a V6/20 would not have enough space to give every customer more than a single address. So, we are back to NAT again. It doesn't look like any sort of prefix delegation is used for customer networks, so I have to guess it's back to NAT again anyway. How quickly can we reject this? So, if you didn't get it by this point, the meme of IPV8 is it's IPv4 plus IPv4, right? If you look at the the way the address is formatted, that that's that's the joke, right? IPv4 IPv4. Now, it's dumb, it's stupid, it doesn't actually fix any problems, it just creates problems that are not as far away as IPv4. But, it does exist technically. Sadly, this has been quoted to me by several people because of random articles online. Honestly though, I cannot see any traction. It almost reminds me of ENS app all over again. I can't see any benefit to it, and I'm not even sure which working group this would land in. The answer is none of them. To the author, while I realize you may have put a fair bit of effort into writing this document, I honestly don't see this going anywhere. It's simply not realistic, not practical, and provides zero real advantage and a whole heap of disadvantages. Thanks, but no thanks. And that's pretty much the sentiment from everyone in the IETF. However, this got quite a bit of discussion over on Hacker News, and by discussion, I basically just mean people making fun of it because it's stupid. And um yeah. Yeah, this this it doesn't it make any sense as a proposal. However, there was one article that actually did a relatively good job at talking about this. That is from Cyber News. And uh they did a bit of a test. Ran it through GPT-2, which is not like a perfect way to, you know, scan if something is using AI. It's like a first guideline. But considering the fact that it has made up references and links to made up documents and makes no sense, um this does seem pretty accurate that it is probably AI generated. This is absolutely not the first time we've seen a fake version of the Internet Protocol. Notably, we have things like IPV9, not to be confused with Chinese IPV9. That is real. Um I might talk about that at some point in the future. That was deployed and uh stopped being used by 2004, but that is a real thing. I mean, this one right here, a historical perspective on the usage of IP version 9, April 1st, 1994. I'll leave this one linked down below if you want to check it out for yourself, but um it's not a long read anyway, so give it a look. Or we have other classics like IP over AC, IP datagrams on Avian Carriers. Basically, um IP over bird. This is also a fun read. I've talked about this in a prior video, and um it's stupid. It's obviously fake. It was on April 1st. Everyone knew this one was fake. But, there are people that think this one is real. And it's not. No, we're not seeing the creation of IPv8. It's not going to happen. Maybe some continuation of IPv6 does happen, but it's certainly not going to be this one. But, hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it will be, and maybe this is going to change the world forever. I don't I don't see that happening. Anyway, um let me know your thoughts down below. If you like the video, go like the video. Go subscribe, as well. And if you really like the video, and you want to become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon Skype still there pay link in the description down below. That's going to be it for me, and what about IP over smoke signals?