A Clean-Slate Design for the Next-Generation Secure Internet

This is the report on a workshop held at CMU on July 12-14, 2005. The workshop is part of the planning process initiated by NSF to explore potential architectures for a next generation secure network designed to meet the needs of the 21st century. In considering future architectures, we ignore issues of backward compatibility with the current Internet but seek to benefit from the experience gained by analyzing both the strengths and weaknesses of the current design. Specifically, this workshop looks at the fundamental interplay between security and underlying network architecture and seeks to chart a preliminary course for future work in this crucial research area. This workshop focused on initiating a productive dialog between experts from the network security and network architecture communities. The agenda was arranged to stimulate initial consideration of the security goals for a new Internet, the design space of possible solutions, how research in security and network architecture could be integrated so that security is included as a first-tier objective in future architectures, and to explore methods for identifying and considering the social consequences of these architecture and security design choices

A Model for Estimating Network Infrastructure Costs: A Case for All-Fibre Networks

The 21st century is an era that has been characterised by phenomenal growth in data rates at the local area network (intranet), extranet and the Internet, a trend pushed by deployment of “bandwidth hungry” applications such VoIP, security surveillance systems, video conferencing and streaming of online multimedia content. Due to demand placed on network resources by these applications physical layer cabling solutions have had to evolve to support faster, improved LAN technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet. Although new network architectures (such as Centralised Fibre networks) address current and long term demands of the modern networking environment, concerns have been raised about its cost viability. The key problem identified in this study was an inadequacy of suitable tools that aid decision making when estimating the cost of a network infrastructure project. Factors of importance in this regard were collected in a survey and used in development of a cost model. A network was designed based on two architectures – centralised fibre (all-fibre network) and hierarchical star (UTP for horizontal cabling and optical fibre for backbone cabling). Thereafter, cost of implementing these two architectures was calculated using the model. Based on the results computed from the cost model, the all-fibre network (centralised fibre architecture) was found to be more cost effective than the hierarchical star network. Keywords: centralised fibre architecture, hierarchical star architecture, structured cabling, multimode optical fibre, singlemode optical fibre, backbon

Platform Dependent Verification: On Engineering Verification Tools for 21st Century

The paper overviews recent developments in platform-dependent explicit-state LTL model checking.Comment: In Proceedings PDMC 2011, arXiv:1111.006

Current screens

The architecture of screen design, including LCD, LED and DLP projection, is analysed in terms of the political economy and their aesthetics and phenomenological impacts, in association with the use of codecs as constraining as well as enabling tools in the control and management of visual data transmission

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Configuring the Networked Citizen

Among legal scholars of technology, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that the design of networked information technologies has regulatory effects. For the most part, that discussion has been structured by the taxonomy developed by Lawrence Lessig, which classifies code as one of four principal regulatory modalities, alongside law, markets, and norms. As a result of that framing, questions about the applicability of constitutional protections to technical decisions have taken center stage in legal and policy debates. Some scholars have pondered whether digital architectures unacceptably constrain fundamental liberties, and what public design obligations might follow from such a conclusion. Others have argued that code belongs firmly on the private side of the public/private divide because it originates in the innovative activity of private actors. In a forthcoming book, the author argues that the project of situating code within one or another part of the familiar constitutional landscape too often distracts legal scholars from more important questions about the quality of the regulation that networked digital architectures produce. The gradual, inexorable embedding of networked information technologies has the potential to alter, in largely invisible ways, the interrelated processes of subject formation and culture formation. Within legal scholarship, the prevailing conceptions of subjectivity tend to be highly individualistic, oriented around the activities of speech and voluntary affiliation. Subjectivity also tends to be understood as definitionally independent of culture. Yet subjectivity is importantly collective, formed by the substrate within which individuality emerges. People form their conceptions of the good in part by reading, listening, and watching—by engaging with the products of a common culture—and by interacting with one another. Those activities are socially and culturally mediated, shaped by the preexisting communities into which individuals are born and within which they develop. They are also technically mediated, shaped by the artifacts that individuals encounter in common use. The social and cultural patterns that mediate the activities of self-constitution are being reconfigured by the pervasive adoption of technical protocols and services that manage the activities of content delivery, search, and social interaction. In developed countries, a broad cross-section of the population routinely uses networked information technologies and communications devices in hundreds of mundane, unremarkable ways. We search for information, communicate with each other, and gain access to networked resources and services. For the most part, as long as our devices and technologies work as expected, we give little thought to how they work; those questions are understood to be technical questions. Such questions are better characterized as sociotechnical. As networked digital architectures increasingly mediate the ordinary processes of everyday life, they catalyze gradual yet fundamental social and cultural change. This chapter—originally published in Imagining New Legalities: Privacy and Its Possibilities in the 21st Century, edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (2012)—considers two interrelated questions that flow from understanding sociotechnical change as (re)configuring networked subjects. First, it revisits the way that legal and policy debates locate networked information technologies with respect to the public/private divide. The design of networked information technologies and communications devices is conventionally treated as a private matter; indeed, that designation has been the principal stumbling block encountered by constitutional theorists of technology. The classification of code as presumptively private has effects that reach beyond debates about the scope of constitutional guarantees, shaping views about the extent to which regulation of technical design decisions is normatively desirable. This chapter reexamines that discursive process, using lenses supplied by literatures on third-party liability and governance. Second, this chapter considers the relationship between sociotechnical change and understandings of citizenship. The ways that people think, form beliefs, and interact with one another are centrally relevant to the sorts of citizens that they become. The gradual embedding of networked information technologies into the practice of everyday life therefore has important implications for both the meaning and the practice of citizenship in the emerging networked information society. If design decisions are neither merely technical nor presumptively private, then they should be subject to more careful scrutiny with regard to the kind of citizen they produce. In particular, policy-makers cannot avoid engaging with the particular values that are encoded