UMass Amherst Computer Scientists Are Helping to Lay ‘Clean Slate’ Foundation for Next, More Mobile and Secure Internet
Sept. 1, 2010
| Contact: | Janet Lathrop 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. - Because today’s Internet was designed for "tethered" computers such as desktop models, its behind-the-scenes operations are often fragile, inefficient and difficult to manage for connecting via smart phones, laptops or sensors.
Plus, with an estimated 4 billion wireless, mobile devices in use now worldwide, more than the total of tethered devices and still rising, it’s important to start addressing the problem, says University of Massachusetts Amherst computer scientist Arun Venkataramani.
He is part of a three-year, $7.5-million multi-university Future Internet Architecture collaboration launched recently by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and known as "MobilityFirst: A Robust and Trustworthy-Centric Architecture for the Future Internet." Its goal is to develop a "clean-slate" candidate platform for future Internet design, optimized for mobile networking and communication. Venkataramani’s UMass Amherst colleagues on the team are computer scientists Jim Kurose and Don Towsley. Other participating institutions are project leader Rutgers, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MIT, Duke and the University of Michigan. UMass Amherst will receive $1.8 million.
"As the name suggests, the compelling motivations for this effort are ‘mobility’ and ‘trustworthiness,’ two aspects in which today’s Internet woefully falls short," says Venkataramani, the lead architect for MobilityFirst. "Mobility means the Internet should seamlessly support mobile devices like smart phones and laptops, the way most of us access the Internet now." Instead, today’s Internet remains fixated on stationary computers.
A compelling aspect of the MobilityFirst architecture is that mobility and trust are synergistic and complementary goals, Venkataramani says. That is, many of the underlying mechanisms used to enhance mobility also improve trust, and vice versa.
A good way to think of desirable changes in Internet mobility which can be provided by new architecture is our current postal system, he adds. It assumes that people stay in one place most of the time and, if you move, you must manually inform all your contacts of your new address. If you forgot to update someone, mail could get lost. If you travel frequently, you can’t expect to receive your mail at all or it’s delayed by forwarding. "Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simple and seamless way of receiving mail no matter where you moved, for however short a time? That is analogous to one of the goals of the MobilityFirst architecture," says Venkataramani.
The other issue, trustworthiness, means that the Internet should be reasonably secure against malicious entities, he points out. Security can never be perfect, but today’s Internet, designed with benign users in mind, is "far from acceptable for what has become a global communication backbone of immense importance," he adds. "Even a benign error by a network operator in some remote corner of the world can make most of the Internet unavailable for many hours. A coordinated, large-scale targeted attack on a company or a nation would be disastrous." Another primary goal of the MobilityFirst project is to make the Internet resilient to resist such an attack.
Further, Venkataramani says, "As things stand today, your Internet account can easily be hijacked or spoofed, allowing a malicious entity to receive all of your communication and to impersonate you. The MobilityFirst architecture will make hijacking and spoofing difficult by using a ‘self-certifying’ addressing scheme based on public-key cryptography. Although public-key cryptography is used in e-commerce applications today, these applications run on top of an insecure network with unverified addresses. MobilityFirst aims to fix these and other significant security weaknesses."
The NSF project is organized into eight work packages. Groups of experienced network/security investigators will team up with creative young investigators to work in such areas as naming/routing, security, net management, mobility, economics and network architecture. The project is anticipated to progress from individual validations of key protocol components such as naming and routing in isolation, to development of a small-scale laboratory prototype, and eventually on to a multi-site, medium-scale system where networking experiments and proof-of-concept demonstrations can be run.
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