Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Universities Tapped To Build Secure Net

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the your-voice-is-your-cryptokey dept.

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."

3 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. How so? by YanceyAI · · Score: 5, Informative
    But what is really exciting is that if we succeed, we could change the world.

    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?
  2. DNS and IP allocation not decentralized by Bookwyrm · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:What's new about it by Salamander · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.