Gregory Donald Troxel

A 50-Gb/s IP router

Aggressive research on gigabit-per-second networks has led to dramatic improvements in network transmission speeds. One result of these improvements has been to put pressure on router technology to keep pace. This paper describes a router, nearly completed, which is more than fast enough to keep up with the latest transmission technologies. The router has a backplane speed of 50 Gb/s and can forward tens of millions of packets per second.

Quantum cryptography in practice

BBN, Harvard, and Boston University are building the DARPA Quantum Network, the worlds first network that delivers end-to-end network security via high-speed Quantum Key Distribution, and testing that Network against sophisticated eavesdropping attacks. The first network link has been up and steadily operational in our laboratory since December 2002. It provides a Virtual Private Network between private enclaves, with user traffic protected by a weak-coherent implementation of quantum cryptography. This prototype is suitable for deployment in metro-size areas via standard telecom (dark) fiber. In this paper, we introduce quantum cryptography, discuss its relation to modern secure networks, and describe its unusual physical layer, its specialized quantum cryptographic protocol suite (quite interesting in its own right), and our extensions to IPsec to integrate it with quantum cryptography.

A public-key based secure mobile IP

The need of scaleable key management support for Mobile IP, especially the route‐optimized Mobile IP, is well known. In this paper, we present the design and the implementation of a public key management system that can be used with IETF basic and route optimized Mobile IP. The system, known as the Mobile IP Security (MoIPS) system, was built upon a DNS based X.509 Public Key Infrastructure and the innovation in cross certification and zero‐message key generation. The system can supply cryptographic keys for authenticating Mobile IPv.4 location management messages and establishing IPSec tunnels for Mobile IP redirected packets. It can also be used to augment firewall traversal of Mobile IP datagrams. A FreeBSD UNIX implementation of the MoIPS prototype is available for non‐commercial uses.

Adaptive Dynamic Radio Open-source Intelligent Team (ADROIT): Cognitively-controlled Collaboration among SDR Nodes

The ADROIT project is building an open-source software-defined data radio, intended to be controlled by cognitive applications. The goal is to create a system that enables teams of radios, where each radio both has its own cognitive controls and the ability to collaborate with other radios, to create cognitive radio teams. The desire to create cognitive radio teams, and the goal of having an open-source system, requires a rich and carefully architected system that provides great flexibility (enabling cognitive applications to change the radios behavior) and also has a clear structure (both so that others may add or enhance the software, and also so that the system can be clearly modeled for cognitive applications). What follows is a summary of the ADROIT system and the key architectural features intended to enable cognitive radio teams.

Cognitive Adaptation for Teams in ADROIT

We have created a sensor-sharing protocol that uses cognition to increase performance by choosing protocol parameters based on the current environment and the past relationships between environment and performance. We have constructed a prototype of the protocol, and experimented with it in a four-node outdoor testbed. Our testbed is part of a larger effort, ADROIT, which seeks to create cognitive teams of software-defined radios [l].

Secure Network Attribution and Prioritization: A Coordinated Architecture for Critical Infrastructure

We describe Secure Network Attribution and Prioritization (SNAP), a system architecture, protocol specification, and prototype implementation for augmenting Internet Protocol with services for fine-grained attribution, attribution-based prioritization with controlled sharing, and autoconfiguration. We define attribution as a security service that identifies the source of traffic on a network. SNAP has per-packet attribution using a header analogous to IPsec Authentication Header (AH) inserted by the first router. Succeeding routers validate the header. SNAP contains a novel prioritization scheme, Priority-Dropped Queuing, which assigns micro-priorities from a range (band) to each flow at the first-hop router. The range is determined by a combination of user identity and traffic class, allowing the network operator rather than the user to set the priorities. SNAPs third component is an autoconfiguration system. Rather than generating configuration files for each router, a network operator writes a network-wide configuration plan. Once configured, plan updates can be rapidly distributed to change the prioritization plan or security policies. Together, these three key attributes allow us to identify traffic and prioritize it, all with reduced configuration effort. BBN has constructed two prototypes of SNAP at 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s. One is based on a COTS 1U PC, running a version of NetBSD with kernel-level attribution and prioritization processing. The second, jointly developed with ViaSat, is a 1U board with FPGAs that implement the per-packet processing, running the same version of NetBSD on the control processor.

Enabling open-source cognitively-controlled collaboration among software-defined radio nodes

Software-defined radios (SDRs) are now recognized as a key building block for future wireless communications. We have spent the past year enhancing existing open software to create a software-defined data radio. This radio extends the notion of software-defined behavior to higher layers in the protocol stack: most importantly through the media access layer. Our particular approach to the problem has been guided by the desire to allow fine-grained cognitive control of the radio. We describe our system, Adaptive Dynamic Radio Open-source Intelligent Team (ADROIT).