The fundamental problems that infrastructure changes face are cases where
1) Costs are borne by party X, benefits accrue to party Y
2) Costs pers user are independent of number of adopters, benefits are
proportional to the number of adopters.
The network effect is only a virtuous circle once costs exceed benefits.
Until that point is reached it is a chicken and egg problem.
One of the interesting features of this analysis is that every time I give
it people:
1) Insist that the analysis is not novel, is obvious and unimaginative.
2) Continue to attempt the approach they admit is obviously going to fail.
One of the problems with modern academia is that novelty and cleverness are
far more likely to advance a career than building stuff that actually works.
So when we have a problem there is a bias in the academy towards an approach
that is novel and allows the designer to demonstrate their cleverness rather
than an approach that was proposed twenty years ago, before the problem was
recognized as important.
Take the problem of BGP security. People seem to be attempting to
authenticate the routes so as to protect the integrity of messages (assuming
DNSSEC deployment). That seems to be a rather unlikely objective to achieve
given the number of backbone providers, the number of packets and the fact
that packets can be dropped. Trying to achieve anything more than preventing
against Denial of Service attacks at the BGP layer is probably futile.
There are two issues, the binding of IP address range claims to AS numbers
and the interchange of routing metrics. We could solve the first problem
pretty easily using a straightforward approach. Each 24 hours the NICs all
sign a list of the IP address assignments to public key holders they have
granted.This can then be used to verify signatures. Quick, simple and does
not require exploration in untested parts of the X.509 stack.
Instead we get a science project.
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