Feb
21
Does Better Security Depend on a Better Internet?
Filed Under big science, research horizons | Comments
Last week the New York Times printed an article by John Markoff entitled, Do We Need a New Internet? In the article, Markoff states, “…there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.” Stanford’s Nick McKeown is quoted in the article, “Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet, we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.” The article speculates that in a new network architecture, some users would “give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.”
It’s certainly exciting to see core computer science issues featured so prominently in the press! Indeed, this article has generated quite a bit of discussion in the research community. For example, while acknowledging that a new network architecture would certainly play an important role in improving security, Purdue’s Gene Spafford writes on his CERIAS blog, “Do we need a new Internet? Short answer: Almost certainly, no.” (Gene tells me that he will be interviewed on this topic on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, airing at 9:30am on Saturday, February 21.) UCSD’s Stefan Savage is largely in agreement, saying that “the network is by and large the smallest part of the security problem” and that “at a technical level the security problem is really an end-host issue, coupled with an interface issue — lots of power given to lots of different pieces of software whose couplings present opportunities to bad guys that aren’t anticipated, at a social level its a human factors issue.” The bottom line is that, outside of resource management (that is, controlling DDoS) and attribution/accountability, the main sources of security risk are at the end points — a key point missed in the NY Times article. Peter Freeman perhaps puts it most plainly:
To be succinct, although technical improvements are clearly needed, a large part of the security issue comes back to people, not technology. If we could figure out how to educate people so they don’t respond to pleas from Nigerians who need to transfer money or they don’t leave their passwords on post-its or never install the frequent security patches that are issued, we could make huge improvements immediately.
That’s not to say, however, that reinventing some aspects of networking isn’t an important research goal. Peter Freeman, while he was the director of NSF’s computer science (CISE) division, was instrumental in helping to launch the GENI Project in 2004, with the goal of developing an experimental platform for exploring truly reliable and higher capacity networks. For Freeman and others, new approaches to networking were deemed an important area for government investment because of the basic nature of the research problems involved.
Mounting a global-scale effort such as GENI has been a major challenge for the computing research community, perhaps similar to what the astronomy community goes through when it decides to develop large telescopes. But the initiative has already had several ripple effects. Guru Parulkar, who was the NSF program manager for GENI at the start, went to work with Nick McKeown and helped start the Clean Slate Project mentioned in the NY Times article. The GENI effort also put Princeton’s Larry Peterson in the middle of things, as the PlanetLab Consortium was one of the most influential early inspirations for GENI. And now, a much broader visioning effort in Network Science and Engineering, or NetSE, supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), is defining the critical research questions in a wide range of network-related areas.
As for GENI itself, significant progress on development of a prototype has been made, coordinated by a GENI Project Office (GPO) and involving a large number of academic researchers. BBN’s Chip Elliott says that a version of the testbed will be available for early testing in a matter of months, “which will allow researchers to investigate many core networking research questions, some of which are the thorniest questions for Network Science and Engineering, upon the earliest end-to-end prototype of GENI.” Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech professor and NetSE Council Chair, cites the importance of this development, saying “For me, the deep technical issues of security and privacy are at the heart of the GENI effort, and one of the main reasons for developing it.”
The demand for better security grows with the public’s dependence on computing and networking. As Chip Elliott states:
Would our lives improve if all aspects of the Internet were firmly bound to real-world personal and organizational identities? Might total public transparency reduce crime and misbehavior – in short, might less privacy lead directly to more security? Is privacy already a vanishing concern, fated to disappear in a few years without widespread regret?
Careful thinking will illuminate these issues — particularly if coupled to a vigorous program of experimentation.
This, in a nutshell, is what the NetSE and GENI initiatives aim to address.
Feb
17
Ruzena Bajcsy (University of California, Berkeley) and Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) have provided the following argument for the development of broadband information-rich immersive interfaces, to support collaboration and research activities.
The United States of America has steadily fallen further and further behind Asian and European nations with respect to broadband penetration and related services. This is impeding the development of new consumer applications (and related new industry and services) and limiting communications in an economy where knowledge exchange is vital in order to be to be a major player of the emerging , seamless and unobstructed global market. Reversing this trend may be of high interest to the incoming administration, but the viability of extending broadband is dependent on the deployment of new high bandwidth and high value applications that (a) will justify the investments required and (b) will contribute digital solutions to many of the key societal problems in this Energy-Climate Era (as recently identified by Thomas L. Friedman in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded) such as growing demand for ever scarcer energy supplies and natural energy, rapid and accelerating biodiversity loss, and disruptive climate change.
In 1997, Jaron Lanier, at the time the chief scientist of Advanced Networks and Services, started the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, as a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications over Internet2. We never capitalized on this initiative in United States. Instead, virtually all major advances in the commercial design and development of 3D multimedia input and output devices such as 3D stereo cameras, 3D displays, integrated solutions for the next generation of home entertainment systems were undertaken abroad. If we look at the corporate landscape of multimedia technology and its integrated multimedia solutions, they come mostly from Asia (e.g., NEC, Panasonic, Sony, FXPal, Samsung) and Europe (e.g., Phillips, Thomson). Swift action is needed to ensure American universities and industries seize the academic and business leadership of the next generation of tele-immersive systems, the 4D Immersive Holographic Spaces.
4D Immersive Holographic Spaces will be joint multi-view multimedia-rich spaces where people can immerse themselves in their physical full body size into a joint cyber-physical space with other people, and execute physical activities (e.g., physiotherapy rehabilitation), walk around people and observe detailed full-body social behaviors and communication cues of people in real-time, as if they were co-located in the same room, even though they are geographically distributed and thousands of miles apart. The impact of such systems would be dramatic, contributing to the increase of innovative economic opportunities, to the “green energy” efforts, and to the decrease of gap between regions of “have” and “have-not” experts. With respect to innovation leadership, venture capitalists will for the first time be able to interact with entrepreneurs located thousands of miles away as if they were next door. Our nation’s ability to find and grow new and emerging high-technology high-quality job-creating companies would extend to all regions of America. In health care, new services based on these cutting edge information systems could be delivered to our rural areas. A physiotherapist based in Washington would be able to provide rehabilitation assistance to multiple remote patients after heart-attack in neighboring regions and a wheelchair basketball coach in Illinois could inspire and train wheelchair children in Montana to play the sport. The children of the men and women of our armed forces would be able to explore the Amazon forest with their parents in a virtual world or simply learn basic values from their parents by bringing them together in their (virtual) home. All of these scenarios are dependent on the ability of 4D Immersive Holographic Spaces to deliver rich visible social cues and multi-view capture of human/group behaviors.
America can lead in the area of broadband information-rich immersive spaces if major investments are made to develop and build national tele-immersive infrastructures. We can then ensure US companies deliver innovative applications and services solutions with our academic institutions as key partners in addressing the research and development challenges. Advances in real-time computer vision, real-time computer graphics, integration of speech, vision and tactile sensory information, dynamic and task-dependent signal compression, and broadband wired and wireless networking with advanced stream-based and multi-view distributed and operating systems and architectures will be needed for the future tele-immersive systems. It is imperative that we move boldly and commit ourselves to this effort.
Feb
15
What is a “Better Internet”?
Filed Under Uncategorized, research horizons | Comments
Ellen Zegura is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She writes to us today in her role as chair of the NetSE Council.
What is a “better Internet”? The current Internet has been a remarkable success, providing a platform for innovation that far exceeds its original vision as a research instrument. It is well documented that the Internet has transformed the lives of billions of people in areas as diverse as education, healthcare, entertainment and commerce. Yet many of these successes are threatened by the increasing sophistication of security attacks and the organizations that propagate them. A materially more secure Internet would be “better”. Further, billions of people remain untouched by the advantages of the Internet; Internet World Statistics puts worldwide average Internet penetration at about 22% in mid 2008. An Internet that affordably reaches the other 80% of the world population would be “better”.
Beyond security and accessibility, there are other areas where limitations of the current Internet are significant. The Internet usually works pretty well, but every user has experienced inexplicable periods of degraded performance or outright non-function. The current Internet provides no visibility to end-users and shockingly little visibility to network managers and operators to support understanding, adapting to and fixing reliability problems. Such limitations require lay people spend their leisure time as network systems administrators and companies to spend heavily in network operations. Further, the lack of performance reliability prevents the Internet from advancing to become a truly dependable, critical infrastructure. Indeed, current societal reliance on the Internet for critical functions is disproportionate to our ability to deliver a high degree of dependability. A more predictable Internet would be “better”.
The Internet embeds societal values in ways that are often implicit and not well understood. For example, the Internet is “open”, usually intended to mean that anyone can join the network by implementing the public protocol IP. In principle, users can run any application on the Internet, without limitation imposed by the network protocols. Open networks promote organic growth, but suffer from a lack of mechanisms to vet or bar participation. Issues of trust and individual accountability are confusing. As the well-known cartoon says, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” An Internet that contains support for identity would be “better”.
The research community is poised to dramatically advance the agenda of building better networks through advances in both empirical design methodology and systematic design methodology. We have an approach to support large-scale and flexible experimentation based on programmability of devices and federation of multiple test-beds. We have a nascent mathematical framework for understanding architectural features and underlying principles. The time is right to advance and link both methodologies to realize better networks.
![[Valid RSS]](/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")