Regional Address Registries, Governance and Internet Freedom

Regional Internet Address Registries (RIRs) are private, nonprofit and transnational governance entities that evolved organically with the growth of the Internet to manage and coordinate Internet Protocol addresses. The RIR's management of Internet address resources is becoming more contentious and more central to global debates over Internet governance. This is happening because of two transformational problems: 1) the depletion of the IPv4 address space; and 2) the attempt to introduce more security into the Internet routing system. We call these problems "transformational" because they raise the stakes of the RIR's policy decisions, make RIR processes more formal and institutionalized, and have the potential to create new, more centralized control mechanisms over Internet service providers and users. A danger in this transition is that the higher stakes and centralized control mechanisms become magnets for political contention, just as ICANN's control of the DNS root did. In order to avoid a repeat of the problems of ICANN, we need to think carefully about the relationship between RIRs, governments, and Internet freedom. In particular, we need to shield RIRs from interference by national governments, and strengthen and institutionalize their status as neutral technical coordinators with limited influence over other areas of Internet governance

IPv6 Network Mobility

Network Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting has been used since before the days of the Internet as we know it today. Authentication asks the question, “Who or what are you?” Authorization asks, “What are you allowed to do?” And fi nally, accounting wants to know, “What did you do?” These fundamental security building blocks are being used in expanded ways today. The fi rst part of this two-part series focused on the overall concepts of AAA, the elements involved in AAA communications, and highlevel approaches to achieving specifi c AAA goals. It was published in IPJ Volume 10, No. 1[0]. This second part of the series discusses the protocols involved, specifi c applications of AAA, and considerations for the future of AAA

FLAIM: A Multi-level Anonymization Framework for Computer and Network Logs

FLAIM (Framework for Log Anonymization and Information Management) addresses two important needs not well addressed by current log anonymizers. First, it is extremely modular and not tied to the specific log being anonymized. Second, it supports multi-level anonymization, allowing system administrators to make fine-grained trade-offs between information loss and privacy/security concerns. In this paper, we examine anonymization solutions to date and note the above limitations in each. We further describe how FLAIM addresses these problems, and we describe FLAIM's architecture and features in detail.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures, in submission to USENIX Lis

Internet... the final frontier: an ethnographic account: exploring the cultural space of the Net from the inside

The research project The Internet as a space for interaction, which completed its mission in Autumn 1998, studied the constitutive features of network culture and network organisation. Special emphasis was given to the dynamic interplay of technical and social conventions regarding both the Net’s organisation as well as its change. The ethnographic perspective chosen studied the Internet from the inside. Research concentrated upon three fields of study: the hegemonial operating technology of net nodes (UNIX) the network’s basic transmission technology (the Internet Protocol IP) and a popular communication service (Usenet). The project’s final report includes the results of the three branches explored. Drawing upon the development in the three fields it is shown that changes that come about on the Net are neither anarchic nor arbitrary. Instead, the decentrally organised Internet is based upon technically and organisationally distributed forms of coordination within which individual preferences collectively attain the power of developing into definitive standards. --

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

Optimizing energy-efficiency for multi-core packet processing systems in a compiler framework

Network applications become increasingly computation-intensive and the amount of traffic soars unprecedentedly nowadays. Multi-core and multi-threaded techniques are thus widely employed in packet processing system to meet the changing requirement. However, the processing power cannot be fully utilized without a suitable programming environment. The compilation procedure is decisive for the quality of the code. It can largely determine the overall system performance in terms of packet throughput, individual packet latency, core utilization and energy efficiency. The thesis investigated compilation issues in networking domain first, particularly on energy consumption. And as a cornerstone for any compiler optimizations, a code analysis module for collecting program dependency is presented and incorporated into a compiler framework. With that dependency information, a strategy based on graph bi-partitioning and mapping is proposed to search for an optimal configuration in a parallel-pipeline fashion. The energy-aware extension is specifically effective in enhancing the energy-efficiency of the whole system. Finally, a generic evaluation framework for simulating the performance and energy consumption of a packet processing system is given. It accepts flexible architectural configuration and is capable of performingarbitrary code mapping. The simulation time is extremely short compared to full-fledged simulators. A set of our optimization results is gathered using the framework