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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."
> I thought the Internet was already decentralized, so I'm curious about what exactly they're fixing.
The only thing that needs fixing is the spammers. You know, so they can't have kids who take up the family business. We could even have Bob Barker provide the PSA at the end of Price Is Right episodes. ("Remeber to have your spammers spayed or neutered.")
"Old man yells at systemd"
If you want a decentralized secure system you have to create a system that does not need an omnisceint trusted party. In otherwords you need an agent based system where each agent's local utility function is such that by optimizing it, it approximates the global utility function. This does not enforce security, but by clever design of the local utility function could make for a bobust system even with "evil" agents.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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?
The internet is horribly vulnerable as it is. It's not so much a problem of pure decentralization as it is one of too many people/requests to handle through too tight a pipe if the other pipe goes down.
As an example...if one day some serious news happened that caused everyone to get on the net at once (Kyoto Earthquake, OJ Simpson on the freeway, Iraq drops a nuclear bomb), and this coincided with a failure of some large piece of hardware along the western coast (under extreme load), the remaining paths for much of this area would be so bogged down as to be useless. Effectively the internet would break under the pressure.
What needs to happen to avoid the problem here is have many more paths for the data to flow, which requires better hardware and further decentralization (would love to see everyone's cable modem be a small internet router for people's data to travel through). Barring that, with the increased worldwide participation on the net expect that some days you just won't be able to use it.
Kickstart
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.
DHT is like having a file cabinet distributed over numerous servers
Is this DHT going to be decentralized so different servers are throughout the country? If so, would yahoo hold files for google? If it is this way, it sounds like my credit card data would be insecure. (Say a p0rn site is holding data for ebay)
Or is it more like a backup of the server that is in the same room? If it is this way, don't most organizations that host their own site have more than one server with the same data?
Or am I just totally confused?
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.
Since every release of BIND ties us more thoroughly to ICANN-dominated centralised name control, I'd guess that DNS would be what they are fixing.
It used to be easy to use alternative roots in conjunction with the "authoritative" (authoritarian?) roots... but now it's one or the other. Caveat - I haven't tried the BIND alternatives yet, there are only so many hours in the day.
The namespace of the Internet is hosed, even USENET's namespace.namespace.namespace is more useful. And the geographic separation of the root nameservers doesn't matter much when all change authority is vested in a single entity.
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.
This seems it would reduce an individual entity's loss to an attack with the idea of, everyone loses a little rather than one losing alot. But it also seems, even though the details in this article are lacking, that physical security of boxes would become more important.
Should the british goverment, a university, and whoever else, trust a small buisness in san diego to house its part data.
the only way this would work from a security stand point would be to make the information that is spread out over 50 or so computers not accessible from the machine its hosted in on. and it seems this would be pretty much impossible(er.. hackerd00ds) from a purely software approach....
do you trust me with your data? um... i dont
--
What is the sound of this sentence?
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.
C'mon guys did you even read the article. NSF is not proposing changing the structure of the web, rather they are hoping to utilize the structure to make data more secure by storing it in decentralized fashion. No one server will contain enough data to reconstruct the file, any server can crash and the file will still be available.
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.
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/
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!).
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
You suggest Vint Cerf dispelled the myth a number of times that the Internet was designed to withstand (in this case, gracefully degrade) under a nuclear attack. I'd be most interested to see a link to somewhere where this is quoted. Most textbooks relating to TCP/IP propagate this alleged myth and I'd be interested to see what exactly Vint said.
I was always under the impression that the decentralized nature of the original network was a design criteria which arose from the desire to withstand (or degrade gracefully more correctly stated) in the event of significant damage to the overall infrastructure. Are you suggesting this is not the case? If so, I'd _really_ like to see the sources you have used to arrive at this conclusion.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."