Priya Mahadevan

Custodian-based information sharing

Information sharing systems such as iCloud, Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter are ubiquitous today, but all of them depend on massive server infrastructure and always-on Internet connectivity. We have designed and implemented a sharing system that does not require infrastructure yet supports robust, distributed, secure sharing by opportunistically using any and all connectivity, local or global, permanent or transient, to communicate. One key element of this system is a new information routing model that so far has proven to be as scalable and efficient as the best of the current Internet routing protocols, while operating in an environment more complex and dynamic than they can tolerate. The new routing model is made possible by new affordances offered by information-centric networking, in particular, the open source CCN [1] release. This article describes the new system and its routing model, and provides some performance measurements.

CCN-KRS: a key resolution service for CCN

A key feature of the Content Centric Networking (CCN) architecture is the requirement for each piece of content to be individually signed by its publisher. Thus, CCN should, in principle, be immune to distributing fake content. However, in practice, the network cannot easily detect and drop fake content as the trust context (i.e., the public keys that need to be trusted for verifying the content signature) is an application-dependent concept. CCN provides mechanisms for consumers to request a piece of content restricted by its signers public key or the cryptographic digest of the content object to avoid receiving fake content. However, it does not provide any mechanisms to learn this critical information prior to requesting the content. In this paper, we introduce a scalable Key Resolution Service (KRS) that can securely store and serve security information (e.g., public key certificates of publishers) for a namespace in CCN. We implement KRS as a service for CCN in ndnSIM, a ns-3 module, and discuss and evaluate such a distributed service. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of our design via simulations driven by real-traffic traces.

On energy efficiency for enterprise and data center networks

In recent years, there has been intense focus on increasing the energy efficiency of IT infrastructure. We advocate the need to consider energy consumption holistically over the entire lifetime of these devices. Life cycle energy considerations include a number of factors, of which operational energy consumption is just one. Of all the IT components, networks have received relatively little attention when it comes to energy efficient operation, and even that has been too focused on operational power consumption. In this article, we describe the challenges relating to life cycle energy management of network devices, present a sustainability analysis of these devices, and develop techniques to significantly reduce network operational power. A distinguishing feature of our work is that it is applicable to legacy devices, and as such can be deployed now, as opposed to waiting for new standards and products to be developed.

iDNS: Enabling information centric networking through The DNS

Information centric networking (ICN) architectures represent a conceptual shift from naming end-hosts in the Internet to naming content directly, and require either significant changes to the existing IP infrastructure or replacing it entirely. We present iDNS (information-centric DNS), an evolutionary path towards deploying ICN at Internet scale based on modifications to the DNS that leave the current routing infrastructure unmodified. We build and evaluate an iDNS prototype, and use it to show that iDNS achieves the benefits associated with ICN (i.e. location-independent naming, nearest-replica-routing) in a manner that both leverages current infrastructure, including content delivery protocols and caches, and supports future evolution towards other network-layer ICN architectures.