The Post Sockets cabal met at
IETF 100 in Singapore in November 2017 to resolve some of the open
issues with the API, and to participate in the TAPS working group.
As part of the trend towards increasing use of end-to-end encryption on
the Internet, we've started to see moves to encrypt the transport layer
headers in addition to the payload data. The QUIC transport protocol is
one example of a transport with this behaviour. Encrypting these headers
has some widely discussed benefits: it reduces information leakage and
provides some small privacy benefit, it helps prevent certain spoofing
and injection attacks against the transport, and it limits the scope
for middlebox-related ossification of the stack. The costs incurred by
encrypting these headers have been less widely discussed, however.
Gorry Fairhurst
and I wrote
a draft that considers these costs, that we presented in the
OPSEC
and
TSVWG
working groups at IETF 100 in Singapore in November 2017.
The initial focus of QUIC development has been on client-server use,
primarily as a transport for HTTP/2. In the long term, however, if
QUIC is to become a general purpose transport, it must be usable by
peer-to-peer applications. This requires support for NAT traversal,
for which the IETF has developed the
STUN protocol and the
ICE algorithm. The version of QUIC specified in
draft-ietf-quic-transport-07 can't easily support this, since its
packets are formatted such that they're difficult to distinguish from
STUN packets. This post outlines the problems and proposes changes to
simplify demultiplexing QUIC and STUN packets. It also considers how
to distinguish QUIC packets from other protocols such as those used by
WebRTC.
The second
FRμIT project meeting was held on 9 September 2017
at Loughborough University. We discussed the infrastructure
and management of the FRμIT testbed, including peer-to-peer
software updates, sensor boards, and high-density Raspberry Pi
cluster hardware.
The ACM/IRTF/ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) 2017
will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, on 15 July 2017 at the
Hilton Prague (co-located with IETF 99).
The programme
has now been announced, and
student travel
grants are available. The deadline for travel grant applications
is 30 June 2017.
The FRμIT project
kick-off meeting took place on 20 June 2017 in the Computer Laboratory at
the University of Cambridge. We heard about the context in which FRμIT
was funded at EPSRC and the related projects, about the Mythic Beasts
Raspberry Pi hosting service, initial progress from the partners, and
discussed next steps for the project.
I'm pleased to have co-authored two papers that were presented in the
IFIP Networking 2017 workshop on the Future of Internet Transport,
held on 12 June 2017 in Stockholm. The first was a paper outlining our
proposal for a Post Sockets API, building on our
IETF draft in this area, written with Brian Trammell and Mirja Kühlewind
of ETH Zürich. The second is with Tom Jones and Gorry Fairhurst from the
University of Aberdeen, and looks at raising the level of abstraction of the
datagram API to enable transport protocol evolution.
Welcome to Emily Band who joined the
FRμIT project today on a summer internship.
I'm pleased to have supervised Aleksi Peltonen's Honours project in
Computing Science, producing animations of how the structure of the
Internet has changed over the past couple of decades.
The
18th Scottish Networking Event was held at the University of St
Andrews on 26 April 2017. SCONE is the Scottish Networking Event,
an informal gathering of networking and systems researchers in and
around Scotland.
Do you have an unused Raspberry Pi board locked away in a cupboard?
Please donate it for scientific research.
We are investigating networked single-board computers (like Raspberry
Pi devices) for micro-data centres and federated micro-clusters.
Currently, we have around 1000 Raspberry Pis at various UK university
sites (Cambridge, Glasgow, Loughborough and Southampton). We want to
scale up this number, to build a distributed UK-wide testbed for
scientific research and experimentation.
Welcome to Dr Herry Herry who recently joined the
FRμIT project as a Research Associate.
We've submitted an updated draft describing Post Sockets
(draft-trammell-taps-post-sockets-00) to the IETF.
The changes in this version reflect the outcome of the
meeting held at ETH Zürich in February.
Our work to define a circuit breaker algorithm for unicast RTP
sessions has finally been published by the IETF as
RFC 8083.
This RFC defines a minimal set of RTP circuit breakers: conditions
under which an RTP sender needs to stop transmitting media data, in
order to protect the network from excessive congestion. It does not
propose a congestion control algorithm, leaving that for other
specifications, such as those under development in the IETF's
RTP Media
Congestion Avoidance Techniques working group.
I visited ETH Zürich on 13-14 February 2017, for a meeting to discuss
evolution of Internet transport protocols and their programming interfaces.
We considered what transport services existing protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP,
SCTP, HTTP, etc.) offer, what interface they expose to applications
programmers, and how the protocols and their API should change to support
future needs. The goal was to make the design of our Post Sockets interface
more concrete, taking input from the IETF TAPS working group, the EU H2020
NEAT project, and the experience of the workshop participants.
The
17th Scottish Networking Event will be held at the University of
Glasgow on 12 January 2017, starting at 13:00 (with a light lunch
provided from 12:00). SCONE is the Scottish Networking Event, an
informal gathering of networking and systems researchers in and around
Scotland.