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."

Comments

real decentralization is needed

[TheSHAD0W]

The current internet was designed to be decentralized, with no specific backbone required; routers would figure out what paths to send what packets over. Scaling-wise, it's been pretty successful. Redundancy-wise, it is less than so. A bad route typically doesn't result in a smooth transfer to another link unless a lot of work has been done to assure it would happen; instead, packets are dropped and communications are badly disrupted.

I had a perfect example of that happen to my current ISP; after getting terrible communications errors, I called them. Turns out one of three of their routes was out; they reset a router, and everything was copacetic. But the other two routes should have been able to handle the traffic. They didn't.

With the advent of IP6, the structure of the net becomes even more convoluted, and errors may become even more difficult to handle. In order to have a nice, stable internet, a system of handling broken routes needs to be integrated into the new spec.

Re:Current Internet not *that* decentralized

[glwtta]

And because each replicates its data set to all other Root servers, catastrophic failure of one would bring down all of the others.

Um, very untrue - the primary root server replicates the data to the rest. If a non-primary root server goes down, you don't notice it. If the primary one goes down, the function is moved to any one of the rest (and you still don't notice it). Basically something like 3 or 4 of them have to go out before Joe InternetUser will notice any effect, and even then it would be somewhat inconvinient, not "catastrohpic". (This is what I rember from some article on the topic awhile back - it's not like I know anything about these things.)

Re:You dont know what you are talking about

[Zeinfeld]

You dumb troll, the arpanet was designed exactly to be a self healing system to survive nuclear attack

No, it was not, Vint Cerf has dispelled that myth a number of times.

The Internet does not emply flood fill routing or any of the technologies that one would want to have available if you wanted to survive a nuclear attack.

TCP/IP was actually designed with the idea that networks could be quickly assembled with minimal configuration issues and without the need for every node to have access to a central co-ordination point.

The Internet does actually have one central coordination point, the A root of the DNS service. However that is decoupled from the minute by minute actions of the Internet hosts so that the A root could in theory go down and come back up without a calamity (but nobody wants to try to find out!).