On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 11:28:39PM -0400, Dan Lanciani wrote: > > That's why it would be best to distribute the data to the prefix holders in > the form of some sort of signed certificates. The registar need only maintain > a fixed-size bitmap of allocated/available prefixes.
Quite. Actually if we could get 32 volunteers (hmm), then this could be reasonably implemented in a distributed fashion. That's 'cause the numbers work out well; 2^40 is a bitmap of ~ 128G, given DVD-R's hold about 4G, that would be 32 DVDs. How about this... So say the customer runs the allocation algorithm and generates a 40 bit number, generates a certificate signed with a key they hold, and send that together with the public key to the appropriate registrar. The registrar sends back an ack/nak for if the number is allocated. The customer retries until he finds an unallocated number. A registrar on indicating a number is unallocated will mark it as 'busy' till the rest of the transaction completes or times out. The customer then pays the registrar, and (eventually) receives back a copy of their certificate signed by a key the registrar holds. The registrars associated public key is well known, so anyone can verify the certificate. The registrar then records that the number is allocated. If the customer can't run the above algorithm, then a registrar can simply be arbitrarily picked to do it all for him - but probably at more cost. I suspect that other than initial costs (software, hardware) the major part of the running cost will be in getting the payment from the customer - but I guess people could utilise some online system ala paypal (or whatever). So a simple matter of programming. Do you think we can find 32 volunteers? DF -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
