Applications in the Future Internet

Peter Steenkiste, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) project is developing a new network architecture that will significantly improve the trustworthiness, flexibility, performance, usability and evolvability of the Internet. It is a large project that involves faculty in networking, security, human-computer interfaces, and engineering and public policy. More information can be found on the XIA web site: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7exia

Two unique features of XIA are support for multiple communicating principal types and the intrinsic security properties associated with all communication operations.  One of the goals of these features is to simplify the development of trustworthy network applications; however, the design and implementation of these features is also closely related to the way applications will use them. For example, XIA allows applications to express their communication intent through the choice of communicating principal type. A file sharing application might use a content principal to indicate that the communication goal is to fetch content, while na ssh-like application might use a host principal to indicate its desire to contact a specific host. The types of principals that the network supports reflects the range of communication "modes" that applications require. In a similar fashion, XIA relies on communication principals to bootstrap application-specific security properties for each communication operation. Since the design of XIA is more closely tied to applications, it is important that we evaluate the impact of XIA on application development.

The proposed XIA project will develop a distributed application over XIA. The choice of application depends a bit on the preferences and background of the students involved.  One example could be a social networking application XIA it since involves multiple communication modes (e.g., exchanging files, contacting/updating users, group communication, and services such as finding friends or online games) and has significant privacy and trust implications.  Other examples could be content delivery networks, or automatic web site acceleration.

Interested students should contact Prof. Peter Steenkiste with a CV and recent transcript.