IPng address joke: The Address is the Message
An April Fools' joke about absurdly large IP addresses.
Crocker, S., "The Address is the Message", RFC 1776, DOI 10.17487/RFC1776, April 1995, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1776>.
@misc{rfc1776,
series = {Request for Comments},
number = 1776,
howpublished = {RFC 1776},
publisher = {RFC Editor},
doi = {10.17487/RFC1776},
url = {https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc1776},
author = {S. Crocker},
title = {{The Address is the Message}},
pagetotal = 2,
year = 1995,
month = apr,
} RFC text
Contents
Network Working Group S. Crocker
Request for Comments: 1776 CyberCash, Inc.
Category: Informational 1 April 1995
The Address is the Message
Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. This memo
does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
this memo is unlimited.
Discussion
Declaring that the address is the message, the IPng WG has selected a
packet format which includes 1696 bytes of address space. This
length is a multiple of 53 and is completely compatible with ATM
architecture. Observing that it's not what you know but who you
know, the IPng focused on choosing an addressing scheme that makes it
possible to talk to everyone while dispensing with the irrelevant
overhead of actually having to say anything.
Security experts hailed this as a major breakthrough. With no
content left in the packets, all questions of confidentiality and
integrity are moot. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies
immediately refocused their efforts to detect who's talking to whom,
and are silently thankful they can avoid divisive public debate about
key escrow, export control and related matters.
Although the IPng WG declared there should be more than enough
address space for everyone, service providers immediately began vying
for reserved portions of the address space.
Security Considerations
Security issues are not discussed in this memo.
Author's Address
Steve Crocker
CyberCash, Inc.
2086 Hunters Crest Way
Vienna, VA 22181
Phone: +1 703 620 1222
EMail: crocker@cybercash.com
AI ELI5
On this page
§1The Joke
This RFC, published on April 1, 1995, is a humorous document written by Steve Crocker. It announces that the IPng working group has chosen a packet format with 1696 bytes devoted to addressing. This means almost all of a packet is address information and almost no space remains for data.
The punchline is captured in the title: "The Address is the Message." Crocker sardonically notes that by focusing so heavily on addressing, the working group has solved the confidentiality and integrity problems of Internet security by eliminating the content of the message entirely.
Steve Crocker jokes that the IPng team picked addresses so big you could not fit any actual data in a packet. The joke is funny because by then, addresses were taking up a lot of engineering energy.
§2The Context
In the mid-1990s, the Internet Engineering Task Force was designing IPv6 (then called IPng, for "IP next generation") to address the impending exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. The working group debated address space requirements extensively.
Crocker's joke targets the intensity of these debates by proposing an absurd resolution: use 1696 bytes—more than thirty times larger than an IPv6 address. The 1696-byte figure is divisible by 53, the size of an ATM cell, which was another technology under consideration at the time.
Back then, people were arguing about how big Internet addresses should be for the next generation of the Internet. Crocker jokes that the argument got so intense they picked a silly size.
§3The Punchline
Security experts in the joke "hail this as a major breakthrough" because with no data, there are no confidentiality or integrity problems. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are "silently thankful" they can focus on detecting who talks to whom instead of debating key escrow and export control—issues that were genuinely contentious at the time.
Service providers immediately start competing for reserved portions of this massive address space, a cynical nod to how organizations often claimed large address allocations regardless of actual need.
If your message has no content, nobody can read your secrets, and spies just watch who calls whom. Companies immediately fight to claim pieces of this huge address space, even though they do not need it.