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Universities Tapped To Build Secure Net
Wes Felter writes "InfoWorld reports that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has enlisted five university computer science departments to develop a secure, decentralized Internet infrastructure. I thought the Internet was already decentralized, so I'm curious about what exactly they're fixing. The article quotes Frans Kaashoek from MIT PDOS, which is working on decentralized software such as Chord."
If they do succeed, how exactly have the changed the world? Am I missing the point? Do I just not get it? Won't they just have changed the Internet...and in a way that would be seamless to most users? Isn't the general consensus that we are not all that vunerable.
Can I bum a sig?
Neither the DNS system (root servers), or the allocation/control of IP address(ing) is decentralized -- they may be heirarchial, but both still have a root.
It will be interesting to see if IPv6 will use geographic hierarchies for routing, or even relaxes the hierarchial assignment-scheme at all. If your IPv6 suffix is static/fixed (based on your MAC address, say), and your IPv6 prefix is from the current network/area you are in, that will be an interesting tool to let people track devices as they move around/between networks.
I thought the Internet was already decentralized, so I'm curious about what exactly they're fixing.
Not quite. The primary vulnerability lies within the Root DNS servers, which contain all DNS information for the entire Internet*. IIRC, there are only eleven or twelve of them. And because each replicates its data set to all other Root servers, catastrophic failure of one would bring down all of the others.
If that ever happens, you can pretty much say goodbye to the Net, at least temporarily.
*Actually, I think they hold the addresses of all Local DNS servers, which is basically the same thing.
The infrastructure of the internet has evolved out of the past few decades yet many key parts are still integral to the existance of the Internet.
After 9/11 several security consultants met in a Senate hearing and demonstrated in a simulation, how the removal of a few key segments could cripple internet traffic (granted some of the plan involved small amount of urban sabatoge).
The internet if scaled down could be compareable to the P2P networks. 90% of content on the internet is provided by less than 10% of computers connected.
The people at http://www.niiip.org/ have amazing documents with regard to security and how the infrastructure of the internet works. Well worth a read.
Another good spot for information, though slightly tainted, is http://www.iisweb.com/. They offer a skewed view of security, as well as some examples of "Worse Case Senarios"
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
The design is meant to be decentralized (except for some databases like DNS) but in practice it isn't nearly as decentralized as it should be.
I remember an anecdote about some company that installed multiple data feeds from multiple vendors to ensure reliability--redundancy is always good, right? Some construction worker was fixing a pipe and cut a fiber cable and sure enough, the company was offline. The different vendors all shared the same fiber so the redundancy wasn't real.
Tons of traffic gets jammed through a few key distribution routes. I'll bet the typical internet user sends traffic through many routers with no backups--you could probably shut down my home cable modem service by pulling the plug on any of at least half-a-dozen routers before it gets out of the provider's internal network. Redundancy in the backbone is nice, but useless if the endpoints are vulnerable.
- Russ
The idea that just because storage is distributed, then it is secure, is only partially true.
If your data is distributed, and one server gets taken out, then fine, you still have service, and the downed server can be re-synched.
If your data is distributed, and someone updates it, then the update is faithfully replicated - even if it is wrong. I work for a company that has its Lotus Notes address database distributed across > 50 locations. One of these would probably survive World War III. Unfortunately, a few years ago, none of them survived a deletion, followed by automatic replication. Took us down for a day, becuase the tapes were only in 1 location.
Of course, you could skip the replication. The you have the non-trivial problem of finding the latest version.
The Rice connection almost certainly has to do with Peter Druschel and Pastry (for which the other PI seems to be Antony Rowstron of Microsoft Research, interestingly enough). I'm not totally sure of the ICSI connection, but they seem to be closely affiliated with UCB and I know that Ion Stoica works in these areas. OceanStore, CFS/SFS, Pastry, Kademlia - it's definitely a pretty good collection. A lot of the top people in DHT/DOLR (Distributed Hash Table, Distributed Object Location and Routing) research are involved, and I'd love to know how they plan to converge their various efforts toward a common solution.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Most of the internet indeed is decentralized, but take out the root servers and the internet is gone...
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Actually, freenet does exactly that. When you use freenet, you store someone else's data on your computer. However, it's encrypted so you never have any idea what you're storing. And you also don't have the only copy of it, so if you delete all your partial encrypted data, it doesn't cease to exist.
Doesn't this sound like the freenet project? An encrypted and decentralized system where everything is P2P, no-one can re-construct your data, and everyone trusts everyone else?
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
TCP/IP has nothing to do with it. TCP/IP is a routed (routable) protocol. Routing protocols are what do the routing. TCP/IP is fine, and there are already routing protocols that do most of the things you specify. Latitude / Longitude is a horrible metric as it can't really measure anything useful. We already have protocols such as IGRP and EIGRP which use bandwidth, MTU, reliability, delay, and load to calculate a scalar metric. Once again, TCP/IP has nothing to do with it. PLEASE don't go saying it is the problem when it's not.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman