CI-P: Planning for Identity and Naming Experimentation Shared Testbed

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Naming and identification is critical to the Internet today, with the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) as the glue making the Internet useable by ordinary people by mapping human-readable names such as www.nsf.gov to Internet addresses such as 128.150.4.107. Originally a simple lookup mechanism in a low-risk environment, today naming has additional roles in the network ranging from content delivery to anti-spam systems. DNS spans many applications because is flexible, universally deployed, and has robust infrastructure capable of supporting high traffic loads. But DNS today faces many challenges: needs for improved security and privacy, richer functionality; increasing dynamic content; orders-of-magnitude more names (at the top with DNS expansion and internationalization, and the edges with the Internet of Things). Most critically, DNS is increasingly difficult to evolve, both due to the installed base of critical infrastructure, and because of increasing distance between the research community and the data and infrastructure needed to make credible contributions. This one year planning project will identify and provide conceptual designs for infrastructure that will counteract this ossification and catalyze research in Internet naming, identification, and trust. The project will bring together researchers on naming, around shared infrastructure that supports: (1) Parallel Resolution Evaluation with simultaneous and safe testing of experiments in the context of live, operational DNS, and (2) Instrumentation And Measurement that helps share real-world DNS query and performance data, employing both technical and legal methods for ethical sharing. Community input will be obtained via focus groups and workshops. The outcomes will be clear statement of the community's infrastructure needs in this area, community-vetted designs for the infrastructure, and assessment of the risks and costs associated with the infrastructure