Quantum Cryptography in Practice

BBN, Harvard, and Boston University are building the DARPA Quantum Network, the world's first network that delivers end-to-end network security via high-speed Quantum Key Distribution, and testing that Network against sophisticated eavesdropping attacks. The first network link has been up and steadily operational in our laboratory since December 2002. It provides a Virtual Private Network between private enclaves, with user traffic protected by a weak-coherent implementation of quantum cryptography. This prototype is suitable for deployment in metro-size areas via standard telecom (dark) fiber. In this paper, we introduce quantum cryptography, discuss its relation to modern secure networks, and describe its unusual physical layer, its specialized quantum cryptographic protocol suite (quite interesting in its own right), and our extensions to IPsec to integrate it with quantum cryptography.Comment: Preprint of SIGCOMM 2003 pape

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Robust Programming by Example

Robust programming lies at the heart of the type of coding called "secure programming". Yet it is rarely taught in academia. More commonly, the focus is on how to avoid creating well-known vulnerabilities. While important, that misses the point: a well-structured, robust program should anticipate where problems might arise and compensate for them. This paper discusses one view of robust programming and gives an example of how it may be taught

Robust Programming by Example

Robust programming lies at the heart of the type of coding called "secure programming". Yet it is rarely taught in academia. More commonly, the focus is on how to avoid creating well-known vulnerabilities. While important, that misses the point: a well-structured, robust program should anticipate where problems might arise and compensate for them. This paper discusses one view of robust programming and gives an example of how it may be taught

The mistaken axioms of wirelessnetwork research

Most research on ad-hoc wireless networks makes simplifying assumptions about radio propagation. The “Flat Earth ” model of the world is surprisingly popular: all radios have circular range, have perfect coverage in that range, and travel on a two-dimensional plane. CMU’s ns-2 radio models are better but still fail to represent many aspects of realistic radio networks, including hills, obstacles, link asymmetries, and unpredictable fading. We briefly argue that key “axioms ” of these types of propagation models lead to simulation results that do not adequately reflect real behavior of ad-hoc networks, and hence to network protocols that may not work well (or at all) in reality. We then present a set of 802.11 measurements that clearly demonstrate that these “axioms” are contrary to fact. The broad chasm between simulation and reality calls into question many of results from prior papers, and we summarize with a series of recommendations for researchers considering analytic or simulation models of wireless networks.