D3.8: Study on protocols with respect to identity and identification – an insight on network protocols and privacy-aware communication

Title: NEXT GENERATION INTERNET PROTOCOLS

This section describes developments in the area of Internet protocols, so called “Next Generation Internet Protocols”, NGIP. The Internet nowadays relies on protocols which for the most part have been developed some decades ago. The very important TCP protocol was standardised in the 1970s. The 1980s brought the IP, DNS and SMTP protocol specifications. POP3 dates back to the mid 1990s, similarly with the first HTTP description. Protocols like WLAN or IPv6 are of much younger age, but these protocols on the lower layers are still used by the older protocols on higher layers mentioned before. 

The older protocols have especially been created within a totally different context than is existing today. When TCP was created, for example, Quality of Service was not an important topic, and SMTP was built with a small and rather closed community of users in mind. Authentication was not crucial back then. This “weak design” is one of the main reasons SPAM could evolve in the way it did. Another example is content delivery of the WWW. Proxies, load-balancing, content-transformation servers and other techniques aiming at delivering content from a virtual host to the clients require sophisticated approaches which are often proprietary and thus violate the original Internet design, architecture and philosophy (Cheriton, Gritter 2000). 

It is important to design new protocols in order to straighten out protocol flaws created tens of years ago. Furthermore, since usage patterns have changed rapidly in the last years, new protocols must support new user demands so that novel applications can be developed and deployed, as well as allowing current applications like streaming media to be utilised without bringing the WWW we know to its knees. And last but not least, a new Internet architecture is important in order to provide more security necessary for governance, commerce and user-privacy. 

Section hypothesises that privacy experts usually do not participate in the design of protocols, although this may be necessary to conduct a proper privacy impact analysis beforehand.

The following subsections introduce main approaches in the area of Next Generation Internet protocols, i.e., Internet2, GÉANT2, TRIAD and FIND.