One of the key aspects upon which societies are and have always been built is the notion of relationships?both personal and institutional. In fact, relationships are so ingrained into people?s lives that their role as a fundamental societal fabric is often taken for granted and not explicitly considered. While powerful in one?s everyday life, establishing relationships within the electronic realm of communication networks leaves one without many of the traditional tools for building, sustaining and recognizing relationships. One cannot use visual or auditory cues to verify that they are talking to a friend. Rather, a message that is just words on the screen could just as easily come from someone they know or an imposter. One key reason for this is because often networks have based the notion of identity on the name of a resource rather than some stronger notion such as cryptography provides. The over-arching goal of this project is to consider how to design future network architecture to first pervasively incorporate cryptographic-based identities and then use those strong identities to establish relationships as first-class citizens within networks. This promises to provide better overall usability, security and trust in the system. Ultimately, this work will develop an architectural framework and components that allow users and institutions to build trusted relationships within digital communications that can be viewed and utilized much like relationships outside of the digital communications realm. This project will consider leveraging relationships for a variety of tasks, such as access control, service validation, and naming. It thus moves past a simple transaction-oriented network to a system that is able to provide general linking of activity across time and exposing legitimate assistive services.
Intellectual Merit: Computer networks were designed to serve people, but there has been little research in leveraging how people naturally behave and work in the real world. One way people generally operate is by establishing relationships and developing trust in those relationships. This project will design a new network architecture that weave this intuitive mode of operation into communications to give users more confidence in the system by allowing users to build relationships that work much like they do in the real world. This work will respect the tussle-spaces that will naturally occur within the architectural designs. A particular tussle-space that will be considered is that of the benefits of exposing relationships compared with the cost in terms of privacy of doing so. The designed architecture will not mandate how a tussle is resolved, but allow users and institutions to reason about these issues and set policy as they see fit. By enabling a network with a solid understanding of both identity and relationships, this project will empower an immense number of services, protocols and applications to use this information as part of their standard processing.
Broader Impact: Over and above its goal of building a trustworthy future Internet, this project will have a number of broader impacts. In terms of networking economics it will make two contributions: (i) added confidence in the security of the overall system will encourage even more widespread use and a broader set of applications as users will feel safe online and (ii) its envisioned new naming system will allow users to choose service providers based on merit rather than on artificial naming constructs. In addition, by putting cryptographic identity as a foundation for the network design, this project will enable cryptographic identity to be widely used within the network architecture. This will have far-reaching benefits to users? privacy by enabling easy encryption of network traffic. Finally, this research will have educational impact in the form of enhanced opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as mentoring of middle- and high-school students through an established foundation with which we are affiliated.
