Award Abstract # 1040800
FIA: Collaborative Research: A Content and Service Friendly Architecture with Intrinsic Security and Explicit Trust

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: TRUSTEES OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: August 26, 2010
Latest Amendment Date: July 23, 2013
Award Number: 1040800
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Darleen Fisher
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: September 1, 2010
End Date: August 31, 2014 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $405,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $476,385.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2010 = $405,000.00
FY 2012 = $8,000.00

FY 2013 = $63,385.00
History of Investigator:
  • John Byers (Principal Investigator)
    byers@cs.bu.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Trustees of Boston University
1 SILBER WAY
BOSTON
MA  US  02215-1703
(617)353-4365
Sponsor Congressional District: 07
Primary Place of Performance: Trustees of Boston University
1 SILBER WAY
BOSTON
MA  US  02215-1703
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
07
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): THL6A6JLE1S7
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Special Projects - CNS
Primary Program Source: 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7363, 9251
Program Element Code(s): 171400
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Today's Internet is under enormous pressure: there is a growing diversity of use models, an urgent need for trustworthy communication, and a growing set of stakeholders who must coordinate to provide Internet services.
The project is developing the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), a potential new network architecture that is built around several key principles. First, XIA represents a single network that offers inherent support for communication between diverse principals including hosts, content, services, and unknown future entities. For each type of principal, XIA defines a narrow waist that dictates the API for communication and the network communication mechanisms. Second, XIA rests upon a foundation of intrinsic security in which the integrity and authenticity of communication is guaranteed using XIA's various self-certifying identifiers. Third, XIA enables flexible context-dependent mechanisms for establishing trust between the communicating principals, bridging the gap between human and intrinsically secure identifiers. Finally, recognizing the Internet's central role in our society, economic, policy, and usability considerations play a major role in XIA's design. The project includes user experiments to evaluate and refine the interface between the network and users, and studies that analyze the relationship between technical design decisions, and economic incentives and public policy.
The outcome of the project will be knowledge about a potential future network architecture that is inherently trustworthy, supports long-term evolution of network use models and network technology, and provides explicit interfaces for interaction between network actors. The architecture will also enable greater visibility and control for various stakeholders, including users, ISPs, and content owners.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Ashok Anand, Fahad Dogar, Dongsu Han, Boyan Li, Hyeontaek Lim, Michel Machado, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella, David Andersen, John Byers, Srinivasan Seshan and Peter Steenkiste "XIA: An Architecture for an Evolvable and Trustworthy Internet" Proc. of ACM HotNets X, Cambridge, MA, November 2011 , 2011
David Naylor, Matthew K. Mukerjee, Patrick Agyapong, Robert Grandl, Ruogu Kang, Michel Machado, Stephanie Brown, Cody Doucette, Hsu-Chun Hsiao, Dongsu Han, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Hyeontaek Lim, Carol Ovon, Dong Zhou, Soo Bum Lee, Yue-Hsun Lin, Colleen Stua "XIA: Architecting a More Trustworthy and Evolvable Internet" ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR) , v.44 , 2014 , p.50
Dongsu Han, Ashok Anand, Fahad Dogar, Boyan Li, Hyeontaek Lim, Michel Machado, Arvind Mukundan, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella, David Andersen, John Byers, Srinivasan Seshan and Peter Steenkiste. "XIA: Efficient Support for Evolvable Internetworking" Proc. of the 9th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '12) , 2012

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

We designed and implemented a future Internet architecture named XIA that is trustworthy, supports long-term evolution of usage models, supports long-term technology evolution, and supports explicit and well-defined interfaces between network actors.  In so doing, this future design remediates some key limitations of the existing TCP/IP architecture, notably the absence of built-in security, and  limited ability for the architectural components themselves to evolve.  The realization of this architecture is embodied by the Linux XIA implementation, implemented and publicly available on the GitHub open-source repository https://github.com/AltraMayor/XIA-for-Linux/.

Major outcomes of the award are presented in the major publications associated with this award, in HotNets '11, NSDI '12, and CCR '14, as well as in the two BU Ph.D. dissertations produced from this award:  Chong Wang (2012) and Michel Machado (2014). 

One major milestone was the Linux kernel implementation of XIA, which, by the end of the award, was complete with a functional network stack, including XDP/XIP, which are clean-slate replacements for UDP/IP, and several new principal types.

A second major milestone is the demonstration of evolvability within XIA, as embodied by the porting of other future Internet components from other projects, and thus never designed to interoperate with XIA, onto the Linux XIA substrate.  A notable example of this, achieved in the final year of the award, is the completed port of the Serval service-centric architecture to provide a service identifier (SID) implementation within XIA.

 


Last Modified: 11/07/2014
Modified by: John W Byers

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