Markdown Version | Session Recording
Session Date/Time: 20 Mar 2024 03:00
# icnrg
## Summary
This ICNRG meeting focused on distributed computing in ICN, particularly transactions. The meeting covered recently published RFCs, active drafts, and presentations on transaction approaches including reflexive forwarding, manifests, and lessons from the Vanadium RPC system. The discussion included authentication, authorization, trust models, and scoped namespaces.
## Key Discussion Points
* **RFC Status:** Four RFCs related to ICN tools and management support (trace route, ping) have been published. These are agnostic to underlying protocols (CCNx and NDN). Active drafts include FLIC (file-like collections) and reflexive forwarding.
* **Transactions in ICN:** Explored different ways to realize transactions in ICN, considering ICN as a messaging layer or leveraging ICN properties directly. Focus on achieving ACID properties, especially atomicity.
* **Secure Web Objects:** A proposed system to move the web towards a more data-oriented approach, enabling web applications to exchange web objects without relying solely on channel-based security.
* **Reflexive Forwarding:** Discussion of using reflexive forwarding for robust request/response schemes, enabling session-like contexts for transactions. Concerns raised regarding multi-way handshakes built from individual two-way handshakes and the complexity of managing state.
* **Authentication and Authorization:** Debate on whether authentication should happen at the time of the transaction or pre-authentication through key distribution and trust schemas. The need for potential application-layer semantics, regardless of pre-authentication, was discussed.
* **Transaction Manifests:** Mark presented initial ideas on transaction manifests for encapsulating data consistency in ICN, including preconditions (what state must be consistent), and post-conditions (what state is being written consistently).
* **Distributed Transactions:** Discussion of distributed transactions involving multiple bookkeepers, touching upon the challenges of live locks, deadlocks, and the need to ensure progress and fairness.
* **Vanadium:** Mark introduced Vanadium, a secure distributed RPC system, highlighting its security model (principles, blessings, caveats) and object naming scheme (mount tables). The potential applicability of Vanadium's security features (particularly authorization) to ICN was explored.
* **Scoped Namespaces:** Discussion of scoped vs. global namespaces and the difficulty of trusting keys. The concept of evolving local namespaces into global namespaces through child-to-parent authoritative pointers was presented.
## Decisions and Action Items
* **ACTION:** Dave to provide apples to apples comparison of Vanadium Security to NDN Trust Schema.
## Next Steps
* Solicit input on future IC Energy meeting topics and timing (e.g., interim after ICNP deadline, in-person at IETF Vancouver, or wait-and-see approach).
* Consider the possibility of an interim meeting shortly after the ICMP deadline.
* Continue discussion on the main list regarding transaction approaches, security models, and scoping strategies.