[Nets-seminars] UCL EE first networks talk of this term

[Richard G. Clegg]

Our first talk this term is one week on Friday (26th of April) by Anil 
Madhavapeddy from Cambridge.  Please find the full timetable for this 
term at the end of this message or here 
http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/research/comminfosys/seminars.  As usual, the 
talks are in GS/102 (66-72 Gower Street) beginning at 16:00 and research 
(and other) discussion continues in the pub after the talk.

Signposts: End-to-end networking in World of Middleboxes

Abstract
--------

The Internet infrastructure is well represented by access providers and 
content publishers, but end users are relegated to the dark edges of the 
net, to languish in anonymity and perpetual darkness, barred from seeing 
each other except via the all-seeing eyes of the Cloud.  We aim to fix 
this by building devices to represent user identity on the network 
explicitly, and provide direct edge connectivity when required.

I'll present Signposts, a system to provide users with a secure, simple 
mechanism to establish and maintain communication channels between their 
personal cloud of named devices, and resolve them to concrete 
addresses.  Signpost names exist in the DNSSEC hierarchy, and resolve to 
secure end-points when accessed by existing DNS clients. Signpost 
clients intercept user connection intentions while adding privacy and 
multipath support. Signpost servers co-ordinate clients to dynamically 
discover routes and overcome the middleboxes that pervade modern edge 
networks.  Signposts also offer a way to unify user identity and 
passwords across most of the devices in our homes.

This is a work-in-progress talk, so I'll describe the system and show a 
small demo, and would welcome criticism of the design (and ideally no 
shoes will be thrown at me).

Bio
---

Dr Anil Madhavapeddy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cambridge 
Computer Laboratory, based in the Systems Research Group. He was on the 
original team at Cambridge that developed the Xen hypervisor, and 
subsequently served as the senior architect and product director for 
XenSource/Citrix before returning to academia. Prior to obtaining his 
PhD in 2006 from Cambridge, he had a diverse background in industry at 
Network Appliance, NASA, and Internet Vision. He is an active member of 
the open source development community with the OpenBSD operating system, 
a member of the steering committee for Commercial Uses of Functional 
Programming, and on the boards of various startup companies.

He founded and directs the $4.5m OCaml Labs group at the Computer Lab, 
which is an industrial-academic collaboration to promote functional 
programming as a real solution for constructing mission-critical systems.

------

Term timetable of talks

26th April -- Anil Madhavapeddy (Cambridge) -- Signposts: End-to-end 
networking in World of Middleboxes
10th May -- Marinos Charalambides (UCL) -- Energy-Aware Adaptive Network 
Resource Management
24th May -- Charalampos.Rotsos (Cambridge) -- A Unikernel approach to 
OpenFlow architecture simulation and emulation
7th June -- Tommaso Valletti (Imperial) -- Unbundling the incumbent: 
Evidence from UK broadband

-- 
Richard G. Clegg,
Dept of Elec. Eng.,
University College London
http://www.richardclegg.org/