There is a signup schedule for this event (UT EID req

uired).

Type of Talk: FACULTY CANDIDATE

Speaker/Affiliation:
Bryan A. Ford/Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date/Time: Th

ursday April 3 2008 11:00 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Talk

Title: Intuitive Global Connectivity for Personal Mobile Devices

Ta

lk Abstract:
Network-enabled mobile devices are quickly becoming
ubi

quitous in the lives of ordinary people but current
technologies for p

roviding ubiquitous global *connectivity*
between these devices still r

equire experts to set up and
manage. Users must allocate and maintain

global domain
names in order to connect to their devices globally via D

NS
they must allocate a static IP address and run a home server
to

use Mobile IP or set up a virtual private network they must
configure

firewalls to permit desired remote access traffic while
filtering poten

tially malicious traffic from unknown parties and
so on. This model o

f management by experts works for
organizations with administrative sta

ff but is infeasible for most
consumers who wish to set up and manage

their own personal
networks.

The Unmanaged Internet Architecture
(UIA) is a suite of design
principles and experimental protocols that p

rovide robust efficient
global connectivity among mobile devices while

relying for
configuration only on simple intuitive management concepts.
UIA
uses personal names rather than traditional global names as
h

andles for accessing personal devices remotely. Users assign
these per

sonal names via an ad hoc device introduction process
requiring no cent

ral allocation. Once assigned personal names
bind securely to the glo

bal identities of their target devices
independent of network location.
Each user manages one
namespace shared among all the user''s devices
and always
available on each device. Users can also name other users<

br>to share resources with trusted acquaintances. Devices with
naming

relationships automatically arrange connectivity when
possible both in
ad hoc networks and using global infrastructure
when available. We bu

ilt a prototype implementation of UIA that
demonstrates the utility and
feasibility of these design principles.
The prototype includes an ove

rlay routing layer that leverages
the user''s social network to provide
robust connectivity in spite
of network failures and asymmetries such

as NATs a new
transport protocol implementing a novel stream abstracti

on
that more effectively supports the highly parallelized and media-
oriented applications demanded on mobile devices and a flexible
secur

ity framework based on proof-carrying authorization (PCA)
that provides
plug-in interoperability with existing secure naming
and authenticatio

n systems.