The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), which develops Internet protocols and architecture, has put up for discussion the first draft of protocol specifications IPv8. The document was proposed by a third-party company One Limited, created outside the IETF standardization process and has the status of “Internet-Draft” (anyone, subject to formalities, can publish a similar draft).
The IPv8 protocol is notable for its use of locally cached OAuth2 JWT tokens to authenticate elements in networks and for the verification of each established outgoing connection through a request in DNS8 (without accessing DNS8, an entry in the XLATE8 state table (similar to NAT) is not created and the connection is blocked).
Addressing in IPv8 is close to IPv4 – the IPv4 address space is a subset of IPv8, and An IPv8 address is formed as a routing prefix (autonomous system number) + an IPv4 address (.n.n.n.n). A zero routing prefix (0.n.n.n.n) produces a regular IPv4 address that can be used to interwork with existing IPv4 networks. Essentially, each autonomous system is given its own separate IPv4 range. In the packet header, the IP field indicates version number 8, and the source and destination addresses are allocated 64 bits – 32 bits for the ASN prefix + 32-bits for the IPv4-style host address.
The solution is stated to be 100% backward compatible, implementation can be seamless and no modification of existing devices, applications and networks will be required to use IPv8. This is achieved through the use of IPv4 in end networks and client systems using the XLATE8 address translator for access to the global IPv8 network, which converts calls between IPv4 and IPv8 in a similar way to NAT.
The IPv8 stack includes the DHCP8 protocol for obtaining addresses and providing services, the DNS8 domain name system, the NTP8 time synchronization protocol, the NetLog8 telemetry collection protocol, the WHOIS8 resolver for approval routes, access control system ACL8 and IPv4/IPv8 address translator XLATE8. An entry in the XLATE8 connection state table is added after a request is sent to DNS8 on each connection and the active route is registered through a call to the WHOIS8 service.