
Huawei proposes to replace TCP/IP at ITU - zoobab
https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2020/discussion-paper-an-analysis-of-the-new-ip-proposal-to-the-itu-t/
======
jlgaddis
I'm pretty sure this is the "New IP, Shaping Future Network" proposal that was
unceremoniously squashed by the IETF a few months ago; that was discussed here
at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776749)

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jeroenhd
The document in question is only accessible for ITU members, but I found an
accessible source discussing Huawei's proposal:
[https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2020/discussio...](https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2020/discussion-
paper-an-analysis-of-the-new-ip-proposal-to-the-itu-t/)

Personally, I would not trust anything Huawei produces because of their
history of design flaws and bad software practices, as well as their ties to
the Chinese government. However, I do see value in reworking some systems,
such as BGP and DNS, which have been patched with optional additions to
compensate for the trusting nature of its designers back when ARPAnet was
small and contained little reason to execute hijacks of resources.

Protections for existing protocols are available though, so instead of
reworking protocols and creating telecom-only protocols, perhaps enforcing
certain features (BGP security, DNSSEC, etc.) for a provider to be able to
name their service "5G" (or "6G" or whatever the next standard is) to make
companies give a damn about security. The same tactic can also enforce proper
filtering to prevent spoofed phone calls on the backbone that American
wireless carriers seem to be so awful at.

~~~
xster
> their history of design flaws and bad software practices

Do you have references to what you're referring to?

~~~
jeroenhd
I don't have the exact links available right now but my position comes from
claimed "backdoors" in their software and hardware.

Research found no backdoors, but all reported vulnerabilities were due to
unsafe coding practices, many many different version of the same library being
reused across the software of their devices with many of those versions being
outdated and just generally a crummy job at coding. There was very little
malice found, only bad practices.

This was compared to vendors like Cisco where secret passwords and backdoors
were hidden obfuscated in their code, which can only mean the company intended
for the backdoor to be there. Personally, I'd buy Huawei before Cisco given
that incompetence is easier to forgive than straight-out malice in my opinion,
but the conclusion remains that Huawei software isn't always up to snuff which
can be a problem when you're trying to push a replacement for the core of the
internet for your software.

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bediger4000
I'm deeply suspicious of this, not only because Huawei seems to have a lot of
Chinese government influence, but because it's from a corporate entity.
Corporate entities appear to not be able to refrain from making things
centralized for the purposes of obtaining monopoly rents.

Informed by this fact of wanting to be a rent seeker, one can guess that
Huawei would want big dollar for a copy of the standard, and maybe a small
license fee for every client. I'd also bet money that there'd be a large
license fee to run a server, and that there's a protocol-level division
between "server" and "client", something that just doesn't exist in TCP or IP.
It's possible to centralize control by means of "Intellectual Property" law
and standards organization, just as it's possible to centralize control with
built-in kill switches.

Oh, yeah: I used to think (in 1990-2000 timeframe) that maybe Microsoft would
be the corporate entity to try to pull this sort of thing off. I often
speculated about "MSTCP" being the thing to put the Internet's genie back in
the bottle. I was wrong about that.

~~~
Animats
It may be a reaction to Google trying to replace TCP with their own protocols
for their HTTP services. The performance advantage is under 10%, but it puts
Google in control.

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reaperducer
All Huawei has to do is get it adopted as a standard in China. Then suddenly
Samsung, Apple, Sony, and all the other non-Chinese companies have to add it
to their devices to keep a billion customers. Then it gets used outside of
China because it is ubiquitous.

This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish play.

~~~
yumraj
Or it could end up like the Chinese GPS, as in phones in China can use it but
outside no one cares.

Phones and devices can support that, but if outside China, it has no one to
talk to.

Though, even in that case it can lead to backdoors.

~~~
edraferi
Navigation satellites are inherently geo limited. Can the Chinese system be
used outside the Chinese mainland?

~~~
yumraj
That is not my point. It can be Geo limited by the OS.

If !(in China) _disable_

Although even that will cause unnecessary headache for hardware and OS vendors
and will/might still lead to new security issues and backdoors.

~~~
nix23
Problem is...you (the chip-maker) pay licenses to the satellite-owners, if
your chip does not work outside china, no money. The Chinese 'GPS' is probably
just for military or for the independence from other systems.

~~~
yumraj
Yes, but hardware vendors need to decide if they put the chip in all devices
and reduce manufacturing/design/testing costs, or put the chip on a Geo
specific model and incur higher mfg/design/testing costs.

It's always a tradeoff and the cost of the chip in itself is not the sole
decision driver.

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altendo
Since this doesn't really mention what the issue is, I would refer readers to
Engadget for an explanation[1]. It seems that Huawei is proposing a new
protocol that would allow for greater control of network traffic, among other
things. As to be expected, this likely is a privacy nightmare waiting to
happen should it actually be implemented.

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-30-china-huawei-new-ip-
prop...](https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-30-china-huawei-new-ip-
proposal.html)

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jmknoll
I recently read a TechCrunch article about the CCP's plan to restructure
global standards over the next decade. Is this proposal a product of that
plan?

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/11/chinas-next-plan-to-
domina...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/11/chinas-next-plan-to-dominate-
international-tech-standards/)

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dfox
My purely technology oriented take on that is that telecom manufacturers had
really embraced the idea “everything is IP over Ethernet” during the
development of LTE and then during first deployments found out, that such
approach does not realy work on real networks with mixed generations of both
infrastructure and user terminals (this is the reason for existence of VoLTE).
And on other hand everybody found out that “computer networking” hardware is
commodity thing that is cheap.

So, Huawei knows that they need something which is not IP and tries to make
hardware that supports it commodity product instead of niche telco weirdness
by trying to push their thing as end-all solution to everything networking. In
fact, from this PoV this is somewhat reminiscent of late 90's and ATM.

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xxpor
I have to wonder why this would be brought up at the ITU and not the IETF. The
ITU in general regulates spectrum usage and the modulation on top of that,
which are more or less restricted to L1 in modern networks. Unless there's
something I'm missing?

~~~
flyinghamster
I wouldn't be surprised if it would go over like a lead balloon at the IETF,
and they're trying to do an end-run around them.

Not to mention, in my opinion, the ITU is far less transparent and more prone
to backroom dealing.

~~~
xxpor
I figured it had to be something like that. Fortunately the last time
something this silly came up at the ITU, it also went over like a lead
balloon:

[https://www.save2m.org/2019/08/france-defeated-thales-and-
th...](https://www.save2m.org/2019/08/france-defeated-thales-and-their-drones-
will-stay-off-the-2m-band/)

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cryptonector
If I could waive a magic wand I'd rework TCP/IP as follows:

    
    
      - reduce routing table sizes by using explicit AS routing
    
        - have src and dst AS numbers in IP packet headers
          and route based on explicit AS numbers
    
        - that would require a decent network prefix to AS
          number lookup service
    
      - maybe reduce IPv6 address sizes to 64 bits
    
      - complete deployment of rpsec
    
      - make TCP a bit more dynamic (e.g., change window
        scaling after handshake)
    
      - fix IPsec -- specifically get RFC5660 implemented
        everywhere, add channel binding support

~~~
gruez
>reduce routing table sizes by using explicit AS routing

>that would require a decent network prefix to AS number lookup service

I don't see the advantage of this. All you're doing is offloading the routing
table to every client device rather than at core routers only. Also, the "AS
number lookup service" would be like a DNS request, which adds latency to
every connection.

> \- maybe reduce IPv6 address sizes to 64 bits

why? The only advantage I can think of is that it's easier to remember/enter
for humans, which isn't really a good reason because there's DNS anyways.

~~~
zrm
> I don't see the advantage of this. All you're doing is offloading the
> routing table to every client device rather than at core routers only. Also,
> the "AS number lookup service" would be like a DNS request, which adds
> latency to every connection.

The better way to do it is to forget about a lookup service and make the AS
number a part of the IP address. This is why you _do_ want 128-bit addresses.
You could make the AS the first 32 bits of the address and then each AS would
have four billion /64 networks.

But in practice this is basically what you get with IPv6 anyway. The problem
with IPv4 is that because there aren't enough addresses, you have people
wanting to add dozens of network prefixes to the same AS because they couldn't
get a single contiguous block large enough for their needs. With IPv6 you can
give every AS a /32 with 96 bits worth of addresses in it and they'd never
need another one.

~~~
cryptonector
Well, sure, if address portability doesn't matter. Which... it kinda doesn't,
so, sure. But AS numbers don't need to be much bigger than 24 bits, so 64 bits
for addresses is plenty :)

~~~
zrm
Existing AS numbers are 32-bit, but sure, 24 is probably enough.

The problem is with 64-bit addresses you'd only have 40 bits left for the
whole AS. They'd quickly run out if they gave each customer a 32-bit block, so
they'd have to use 20-bit blocks or so.

Then you have corporate customers who want to do complex internal subnetting,
for which 20-bit wide blocks are administratively burdensome. 10.0.0.0/8 is
24-bit and they already run into problems there. They start having to use
variable-sized subnets because the main office needs a 14-bit wide block but
you don't have enough addresses to give every office that many, and then you
have to renumber any time the size of an office changes, and probably renumber
two other offices to free up a large enough contiguous address block.

That all goes away if you can give every customer billions of addresses and
they don't have to worry about their subnets being "too big" which means they
never end up being too small.

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chaz6
This is like how some people wanted to remove some protections afforded by TLS
1.3 with PFS, so they went to ETSI who ratified eTLS. The ITU has nothing to
do with the internet so this is just another publicity stunt. The internet
works because everybody agrees on a common set of RFC's. It is nigh on
impossible for a single entity to force a change.

------
scroot
X.25 is finally getting its day

~~~
dfox
In fact, the proposal really is strikingly similar to X.25. On the other hand
for the breath of problems that they try to solve it makes sense.

On the other hand there really is no reason to create one unified protocol to
solve all that at once. IETF's “all that can be done on IP and this is how” is
kind of bold statement, as there are applications where only reason to involve
IP is marketing, eg. there is little reason to involve IP in various hard-
realtime-ish short range IoT-ish things (that one popular hard-realtime safety
critical industrial automation protocol involves not only IP but DCOM on top
of slightly non-standard ethernet to solve problem that is perfectly solved by
RS-485 based bus is another thing)

~~~
tialaramex
"Just always do IP" is because of the existing ecosystem of tools, techniques
and so on, which all assume IP because IP is very popular. Almost every
application can benefit from this†

For every single problem there will be a hypothetical ideal solution that's
custom in every way like a bespoke suit, but you (or your customers) probably
can't afford that solution and so that's the wrong solution.

If IP isn't good enough, I would strongly urge you to go help it be better
rather than sit on the sidelines saying people shouldn't bother using IP.
Mostly for self-preservation reasons, if it can be done somebody is going to
do it, and that might as well be you - if it can't be done you'll end up the
expert on why not.

† _Really_ often these applications says they use IP to benefit from this
ecosystem but they aren't on the Internet, and when you look closer - oops,
nobody told the people implementing them about not being on the Internet, so
they actually are on the Internet, peeking out from unexpected places.

~~~
dfox
That is essentially my point with the exception that there are things that are
inherently L2 and thus you don't want to bother with IP or for that mater any
other L3 protocol.

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0-_-0
A bit offtopic but I was thinking that it might actually be possible for some
companies to replace TCP/IP. Let's say Apple. They probably have enough money
to do the SpaceX thing and have a network of satellites in orbit that could
replace the mobile network all iPhones connect to worldwide. Since they
control all the devices that connect to this network, they would have full
control over the internet protocol it uses and could invent their own, from
scratch. Actually, SpaceX could probably do the same if they run SpaceXnet in
parallel with TCP/IP and sell their own hardware (or do a TCP/IP over
SpaceXnet protocol that they use between ground stations)

~~~
C1sc0cat
Latency your forgetting Latency

~~~
maemilius
A StarLink style satellite array actually has good latency even when compared
to traditional fiber networks[1].

I recall some calculations that showed a decrease in latency over long
distances because light travels slightly faster in a vacuum, there are fewer
intermediate nodes over that distance, and a more direct path can be used than
in our existing wired networks.

The biggest issue with current satellite connections is that the satellites
are in geostationary orbits which imposes a minimum theoretical latency of
something like half a second. It's physically impossible to send signals any
faster[2].

1: [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/03/musk-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2020/03/musk-says-starlink-isnt-for-big-cities-wont-be-huge-threat-
to-telcos/)

2:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Sign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Signal_latency)

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oneplane
Isn't this about the earlier Huawei proposal that got shot down somewhat
harshly?

~~~
finnthehuman
Yep. The "New IP, Shaping Future Network" presentation was made to the ITU.

The shutdown you're thinking of was from the IETF [0], who of were publicly
responding to the presentation publicly forwarded to them by the ITU [1].

Of course IETF are incentivized to think the process of protocol evolution
they coordinate is the right place and way to set standards (but that doesn't
mean they're wrong). Now ITU stakeholders are chiming in, and we can expect to
see more over the coming months.

[0]
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1677/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1677/)
[1]
[https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1653/)

------
junon
Can someone explain? From what I understand, they don't plan to replace
TCP/IP. The body of text merely states it has been a staple of internet
protocols, somehow saying it's been even further proven during covid-19.

~~~
finnthehuman
The EU is responding to an ITU proposal that is both a combination of light on
technical details about new network protocol(s), and more importantly would
substantially upend the process for internet protocol development process. The
mention of TCP/IP is because the "New IP, Shaping Future Network" presentation
make sketchy statements about incapabilities of current Internet design. There
are also concerns about the level of top-down control of the network the new
protocol is set to enable.

In other words, this ITU participant is telling Huawei if they think their
tech is such hot shit then go write an RFC and get bottom-up adoption of their
idea like everyone else.

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betaby
LISP routing again, poor re-implementation.

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TurkishPoptart
Why the European Commission even acknowledges anything Huawei says or does is
astounding.

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takecarefnd
who cares

