IETF Icy Toward Outsiders
By Christy Hudgins-Bonafield
Government by consensus is a lot tougher for 300 folks in a packed ballroom than it is for 10 people around a dining room table--that's the beef of many Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) members lately. With conference attendance in the standards organization nearly doubling annually--more people lost their badges at the most recent IETF
meeting in San Jose, Calif., than attended the 1991 IETF meeting--just about everyone at the group's latest meeting of 1,981 members agreed that locations readily accessible from Silicon Valley are out. We suggest the Bearskin Lodge in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area in J
anuary. We promise no mosquitoes, no gawkers and no distractions.
Gandalf's Security Layers: Tunneling, Encryption And Compression
Gandalf Systems Corp., which predicts that most large Internet service providers (ISPs) will offer Internet tunneling by midyear, was expected this month to announce the extension of tunneling services to its own central-site ISP products. Shipment is slated for March. Rod Yaehne, Gandalf's director of software development, says he believes a big advantage the company will have in this market is its provision of 256-bit proprietary encryption (in North America) on top of its own proprietary data compression algorithms. In addition, Gandalf is developing a key-recovery technology.
 Yaehne says Gandalf will support all three tunneling approaches as well as the IETF standard expected to be ratified early this year. If the standard isn't ready, he says, the product
will still ship, with free upgrades to match the completed specification. Yaehne says Gandalf also has plans to implement its compression/encryption in ASICs. Today, he says, servers take a 5 percent to 10 percent hit as a result of the encryption--some
thing that won't scale with Gandalf's 1997 release of its next-generation 672-connection server, code-named Project Exceptional. ASICs also will make it easier for business partners to incorporate Gandalf's compression in their own products.
The Rule Of Renegade Registries
Although a blue-ribbon panel was expected by this time to recommend how the Internet Society should set up alternative domain name registries, there's little optimism that the group's conclusions will resolve the contentious battle over who can establish a registration and under what conditions. Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) head Jon Postel, who has guided the registry process since the early days of the Internet, says he expects one of the bigg
est challenges to be ensuring the technical quality of those businesses that start up .biz, .earth or other alternatives to .com domain names on the Internet. He says he believes the only alternative is for the Internet Society (ISOC) or an expert panel set up by ISOC to oversee such groups. Even so, Postel expects "renegade" organizations lacking ISOC's blessing and operating outside agreed-upon rules will set up shop on the Internet. Whether these businesses will wreak havoc by balkanizing name spaces is anyone's guess. Renegade registries, Postel notes, could effectively work from a copy of the root zone, but even so, it's not clear whether they would cooperate with one other to ensure a unified naming structure.
"The chances are that someone, somewhere will be offended by the panel's recommendations, and we'll face some of these issues," says Postel, adding that he believes ISPs will play an important role in determining whether the Internet becomes fragmented, by determining in a unified or a scatter
ed fashion which alternative registries they choose to use, if any. ISOC management once held out hope that the registries might prove a source of revenue for the organization; now, however, Postel says he has talked informally to a number of possible corporat
e sponsors, "and there seems to be a willingness to contribute."
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