While the Internet has far exceeded expectations, it has also stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model. Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location. To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today's focus on where ? addresses and hosts ? to what ? the content that users and applications care about. This project investigates a potential new Internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN capitalizes on strengths ? and addresses weaknesses ? of the Internet's current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication. By naming data instead of their location, NDN transforms data into a first-class entity. The current Internet secures the data container. NDN secures the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth. The project studies the technical challenges that must be addressed to validate NDN as a future Internet architecture: routing scalability, fast forwarding, trust models, network security, content protection and privacy, and fundamental communication theory. The project uses end-to-end testbed deployments, simulation, and theoretical analysis to evaluate the proposed architecture, and is developing specifications and prototype implementations of NDN protocols and applications.
Named Data Networking is a project under NSF's Future Internet architecture program. Colorado State University participates in the program along with several other universities. NDN changes the communication paradigm from the current Internet's host-centric paradigm to content-centric and adds mandatory digital signing of all content. The result is a communication paradigm closely aligns with user desires and eliminates many of the vexing security problems with the current Internet. The NDN team consists of a diverse mix of over 20 researchers from 10 campuses bringing a wide spectrum of expertise to tackle the ambitious interdisciplinary research agenda. CSU researchers contributed to the project in the areas of network management, security and content poisoning defenses, outreach and education. In addition, CSU has contributed to the application space in NDN via a related project "Supporting Climate Applications in NDN" (NSF CC-NIE award #13410999) In network management our contribution includes taking the lead in drafting our testbed connection policy, which has now been implemented and enforced by Washington University. The policy clarified the terms a new site must fulfill to connect to our current testbed. We now have approximately 23 nodes in the testbed, with the majority belonging to institutions outside the NDN team. The testbed currently spans a large geographic distance from China to Europe. We also participated in the design and development of NFD, the NDN forwarding daemon. In particular, our contributions focused on implementing NFD's management modules, referred to as managers, that provide an Interest/Data API for interacting with NFD and documenting their inner workings. We have carried out a measurement analysis of the forwarding performance of NFD. We have designed, implemented and are in the process of evaluating a system that defends against content poisoning. Malicious objects named identically to legitimate ones can slow or even prevent consumers from retrieving the desired content. In NDN, consumers can easily detect poisoning attacks due to the signatures on each object, but they have limited ability to evade such attacks. Our defense system detects false reports and uses specific forwarding strategies to circumvent poisoned content and whitelist benign nodes. In the applications space we designed and are developing software that allows Climate scientists to publish, search and retrieve datasets published through the CMIP5 project. We are in the process of designing similar software for scientists working in high-energy Physics. To support both applications we deployed a 6-node 10G testbed over ESnet, spanning from LBNL in California to NWSC in Wyoming, going through Sacramento and Colorado. In outreach we managed two tutorials, one at ICN 2015 and one at the GENI conference (GEC 21). The ICN tutorial was a joint effort from several members of the NDN team. The tutorial has been recorded and portions of it are available from the NDN website (www.named-data.net) To help educators, we maintain a set of introductory slides and class exercises that we make available freely for classroom use. We have also developed an exercise that is included in the GENI collection of educational exercises.
