• New Internet Architecture Board, IETF Trust, IETF LLC and Internet Engineering Task Force Leadership Announced

    Members of the incoming Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the IETF Trust, the IETF Administration LLC (IETF LLC) Board of Directors, and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG)—which provides leadership for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—have been officially announced, with new members selected by the 2021-2023 IETF Nominating Committee.

      13 Feb 2023

    • Informing the community on third-party correspondence regarding the W3C

      In accordance with our policy of transparency, this blog post is being published in order to keep the community informed about recent correspondence with lawyers acting on behalf of the Movement for an Open Web.

      • Lars EggertIETF Chair
      8 Feb 2023

    • Six Applied Networking Research Prizes Awarded for 2023

      Six network researchers have received Internet Research Task Force Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP), an award focused on recent results in applied networking research and on interesting new research of potential relevance to the Internet standards community.

      • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
      9 Jan 2023

    • Travel grants allow Ph.D. students to participate at IETF meeting in-person

      Sergio Aguilar Romero and Martine Sophie Lenders, both Ph.D. students in technology fields, attended and participated in the IETF 115 meeting in London with assistance through travel grants from the Internet Research Task Force.

      • Grant GrossIETF Blog Reporter
      7 Jan 2023

    • Impressions from the Internet Architecture Board E-Impact Workshop

      The IAB ran an online workshop in December 2022 to begin to explore and understand the environmental impacts of the Internet. The discussion was active, and it will take time to summarise and produce the workshop report – but the topic is important, so we wanted to share some early impressions of the outcomes.

      • Colin PerkinsIAB Member
      • Jari ArkkoIAB Member
      6 Jan 2023
    • Show all

    Filter by topic and date

    Filter by topic and date

    Future Identifiers

      29 Oct 2013

      When I visited the ICANN meeting last summer, they were about to launch a set of panels to advice themselves about strategic topics in coming years. Those panels are now operational.

      I promised to join one of them, on identifier technology innovation. More information about the panel and its members can be found here; you’ll also recognise a few other IETFers.

      The topic for this effort is future evolution of DNS and other identifiers, including relevant security and management aspects. The viewpoint is primarily to look at this from ICANN’s angle, but of course the matter is interesting to us others as well. And the panel is not a place to develop new technology — IETF and other places are.  But the panel should develop an understanding of where the technology is going, either because of an already started evolution or because something new is needed. And perhaps we at the IETF should also understand the same things. Hence this article.

      I have some ideas on what some of these trends might be. But what do the rest of you think? Where is identifier technology going, and what new things are on the horizon?

      Just to get you started, one obvious trend for me is the way end users identify material on the Internet. This keeps changing rapidly, e.g., through search engines and social media. And new “identifier” spaces are created all the time in different contexts, just consider hashtags as one small example. In other words, applications evolve much faster than underlying networking or domain name technology.

      But there are also some technology developments. For instance, identifier-locator split mechanisms, e.g., HIP or LISP. Or new security technology, such as DANE which promises to employ DNSSEC for setting up security for applications. Or information centric networking (ICN) that uses identifiers for data rather than devices. What kind of effect do these technologies have? What other technical developments are relevant?

      And there are also many remaining challenges that may need further innovation, for instance in the areas of IDN or DNSSEC or the underlying security solutions.

      But these are just initial thoughts. What does your crystal ball say about the future of identifier technology? Tell us what you think on the IETF list.

      Share this page