[ih] Flow Control in IP

[Karl Auerbach]

I think Steve Crocker answered your question about RFNM and why we 
needed to deal with it across our cryptographic barrier.

As for the other part - Yes, the history of the Internet has a lot of 
non-technical stories.  Those stories provide a really interesting (to 
me) meta story about how ideas are born, how they evolve, how 
personalities and events interplay with technology. To me these are 
important things, particularly among young people who can excusably say 
that they think all the fun stuff has been done already.  To my mind the 
history of the net that we've been discussing is really just the 
lighting of the fuse of fireworks yet to be seen - many of those 
fireworks will be outside of, but strongly affected by, our technical 
choices.

(And as a participant in the growth of the net I am also intrigued by 
the human aspects - ranging from some of our clothing choices [such as 
Mike Padlipsky's red suit with white piping] to the romances [and 
marriages, including my own], to the deep friendships that were born of 
intense, hard work [such as our Interop network commando-networking 
team].  We could fill a Dickens novel with intriguing, non technical, 
people and happenings.  For instance there's the story of the first 
Internet Band, Severe Tire Damage, in the DEC parking lot in Palo Alto, 
their parties with Anita Borg and others, and the "innocence" of 
copyright lawyers at Sony and other music companies about music over the 
Internet.)

(Some years back I did a badly filmed, badly recorded, short film about 
Severe Tire Damage: https://www.history-of-the-internet.org/videos/std/ )

The lawyer in me also is interested in those ancillary stories. (I 
almost took a legal position in the chief counsel's office at NTIA in 
1978 where I would have been one of two people who knew of the nascent, 
growing network - my job interview involved rewriting a major policy 
paper [at a DC bar] on computer/network privacy for President Carter.)  
We can learn a lot from the history of the net why some ideas succeed 
and others, even with strong backing (ISO/OSI/Gosip/Map/Top), sank as 
much from ill framed exposition and advocacy as from overwrought technology.

         --karl--

On 4/30/24 2:26 PM, John Day wrote:
> First of all, great story!!!  ;-)  Sounds like a number of things outside the rules that went on. It was a great time!!
>
>> On Apr 30, 2024, at 14:50, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> In our early security work at SDC (circa 1972-4) we were trying to interpose an end-to-end encryption into ARPAnet protocols.  One aspect kept getting our technical goats - RFNM - Request For Next Message.  The reason was that this message was generated by elements (destination IMPS) below our encryption but needed to be delivered to elements above our encryption.
>>
>> (I know that RFNM was supposed to from destination IMP to source IMP, but for reasons that I no longer remember, it ended up crossing our security/cryptography barrier.)
> I don’t know, but let me suggest what it was and you can tell me if that is it. About this time there was something called ‘receipt confirmation.’  The idea was that receiving acks should notify the sender.  CCITT was especially big on it.  It was a bone of contention, some thought it was a good idea, some didn’t. Those who liked more determinism liked it. The argument for Transport Protocols was that it was IPC and IPC didn’t give the user an ack, so the Transport protocol shouldn’t. The acks were entirely inside the layer.
>
> So was this receipt confirmation?
>
> Take care,
> John
>
>> RFNM became a pejorative, or rather, was the subject of many pejorative outbursts by our group (Dave Kaufman, Frank Heinrich, Marv Schaeffer, Jerry Cole, Carl Switzky, Jerry Simon, Josie Althous, Val Schorre, John Scheid, Hillary X <can never remember her last name>, Jay Egglestun, Dave Golber, and myself.)
>>
>> We had to engineer a trusted (mathematical specifications of security, formal verification of code against that security spec) hardware/software bypass around our cryptographic layer (much of which was in very expensive Tempest grade hardware) to deal this this.
>>
>> (As our work progressed, TCP came along and we moved our work over to that approach, using the evolving split of an IP-like layer from the bottom of TCP, as a wedge into which to insert our security protocols. This was a much better design for our purposes when measured by Wirth's definitions of modularity (minimal information flow between modules). Our designs got easier and less Rube Goldberg - except that along the way we had begun to use much more complex modes of encryption (we'd call it blockchain today) and key management.
>>
>> Apropos Hamlet's line that “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” the Internet grew from a soil rich with pranks, strange events, and  not a little romance. Such as this:
>>
>> As that happened our network security work got moved behind multiple layers of guards and locked doors (and special RF containment rooms). That had the effect of isolating us from company management who lacked the clearances to come into our area.  It was at that time what some of us wanted to make our offices nicer - in violation of SDCs rather strict organizational hierarchy.  So one evening we (Carl Switzky and myself) found a large spool of rather nice, essentially new, white wool carpet that was being discarded by a super high end shop on San Vicente and I had an International Harvester truck large enough to carry that spool. It was also at that time we discovered that while the SDC guards had instructions not to allow things to be carried out from the buildings that they had no instructions about carrying things in.  And through a strange coincidence of the dark forces of the universe one of our group was working late and also had a carpet knife attached to his belt.  So the next day we all had really nice white wool carpet in our offices, inside the high security zone (we did all the offices in order to create plausible deniability about our role.)
>>
>> 	--karl--
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