Project Summary : NeTS-FIND : User Information Architecture

The proposed work will explore a network architecture intended to support global connectivity for large numbers of smart personal devices. It is increasingly common for ordinary people to have many small devices such as digital cameras, smart phones, and laptops. They often need to have these devices communicate with each other both locally and over long distances, and they often need to exchange information or services (e.g., printing) with other people’s devices. There are technologies that address individual needs, such as USB and Bluetooth, but there there is currently no communication architecture truly suitable for small devices. A device-oriented network architecture should have the following properties. It should provide user-relative names in order to avoid making users cope with global uniqueness. Each name should have a strong binding to the identity of the device named, independent of its current location or network attachment point. Assigning names must be a simple and intuitive process. Each user should only have to manage one namespace, shared among all the user’s devices. Users should be able to share their namespaces and device resources selectively with trusted acquaintances. Devices that have naming relationships should automatically arrange connectivity when possible, both in ad hoc local networks and using available global communication networks. There are a number of design challenges in realizing such a device-to-device architecture: it must function without requiring fixed infrastructure, it must present a consistent namespace to each user despite a user’s many devices, it must support disconnected and partitioned operation, and it must support flexible routing. The proposed architecture, called UIA for User Information Architecture, will achieve the above properties. UIA’s main focus is managing names, since names are the tool with which users make sense of their device environment and express intentions about who they want to talk to and who they want to allow access to their devices. Each device will have a private key and a unique end-system identifier that is derived from the corresponding public key to help provide authentic and private communication. A user assigns a simple name (such as “laptop”) to each newly acquired device. A user’s devices cooperate to maintain a complete, consistent, and secure namespace by gossiping logs of the user’s changes to the namespace. A namespace may contain both the user’s devices and named links to other users’ namespaces; users can form links securely either by physical introduction (e.g., via USB) or through mutually trusted third parties. These mechanisms let each user define their own local namespace, an easier job than fitting names in a global namespace. UIA will include a flexible routing architecture to cope with a spectrum of connectivity environments. It will use ad hoc routing through trusted users’ devices when groups of devices form islands of connectivity, an overlay and informal rendezvous to find current IP addresses when devices have Internet connectivity, and a clean-slate scalable routing system with flat addresses for a future native UIA global network. In order to increase practical impact, UIA is incrementally deployable and provides immediate practical benefits to anyone deploying it. The PIs have initiated collaborations with Quanta Computer Inc. in Taiwan and with Nokia to gain from their experience with small devices and as potential paths to widespread deployment. Intellectual Merit: UIA’s namespaces allow a novel combination of local control and global communication. The namespaces solve a number of serious problems with existing secure naming systems that make it hard for unskilled users to manage them; for example, UIA does not need per-user private keys (which could be lost), yet is able to provide an intuitive notion of revocation of the rights of a lost device. At a higher level, UIA reconsiders naming, addressing, and routing from the point of view of personal devices, leading to an architecture distinct from that of the Internet. Broader Impact: UIA will provide a coherent network architecture for small devices, a fast-growing category that is badly served by the Internet. It will avert a future in which people rely on devices but do not understand or trust the way they communicate; global communication will be as convenient and secure as connecting two devices with a cable. It will open the way to new applications in which devices act in cooperation. FIND areas: The proposal addresses all the areas, but is centered around New computing paradigms, Security and availability, and Network Management.