October 26, 2011
Networking Group researcher Barath Raghavan and UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Justin Ma have found that the Internet and devices that access it are responsible for about 2 percent of the total energy used globally. The researchers estimated how much energy it takes to manufacture end systems, such as laptops and smart phones, as well as how much energy these devices use.
November 16, 2011
ICSI alum Mark Handley will receive the 2012 IEEE Internet Award. Handley is recognized for his contributions to Internet multicast, telephony, congestion control, and the shaping of open Internet standards and open-source systems in all these areas. Past winners of the award include Networking Group leader Scott Shenker in 2006 and Networking Group researcher Sally Floyd in 2005. Read more about the award here >>
Some Internet service providers (ISPs) redirect their customers' Internet searches through third-party companies, according to Networking Group researchers. The behavior is one of several that researchers have tracked using data gathered by Netalyzr, an online tool that tests how open and transparent a user's connection to the Internet is. Netalyzr has been used more than 350,000 times since it went live in 2009, and this summer received recognition from both the Internet Society and the Federal Communications Commission.
In collaboration with Case Western Reserve University, we are investigating foundation architectural constructs that bring users into networked systems in a way that has to this point not been possible. Rather than relegating users to an artifact of the application layer, we seek to accommodate users and their relationships at all layers of the system and to give users new controls over how their traffic is handled by the system. More >>
Today's routers and switches are both complicated and closed. The forwarding path on these boxes involve sophisticated ASICs, and the large base of installed software is typically closed and proprietary. Thus, functionality can only evolve on hardware design timescales, and only through the actions of the vendors. At ICSI, in collaboration with our colleagues at Stanford University, we are pursuing a radically different approach which we call Open Software-Defined Networks.
Along with research groups around the world, we are exploring fundamental questions about Internet architecture. In particular, we are, "If we were to redesign the Internet, what would it look like?" This effort involves looking at all aspects of the Internet architecture, including addressing, intradomain routing, interdomain routing, naming, name resolution, network API, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Moreover, the effort involves both in-depth investigations of these isolated topics, and a synthesis of these aspects into a coherent and comprehensive future Internet architecture.
We conduct extensive research on technology for analyzing network traffic streams to detect attacks, either in "real time" as they occur, or in support of post facto forensic exploration. The particular context for much of this research is the open-source "Bro" network intrusion detection system authored by ICSI staff. Bro runs 24x7 operationally at a number of institutes, and we have particularly close ties with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Bro deployments have formed an integral part of the Institute's cybersecurity operations for more than a decade.
One of the most disturbing recent shifts in Internet attacks has been the change from attackers motivated by glory or vanity to attackers motivated by commercial (criminal) gain. This shift threatens to greatly accelerate the "arms race" between defenders developing effective counters to attacks and highly motivated, well funded attackers finding new ways to circumvent these innovations.
Typical Web pages may contain numerous third-party components, ranging from advertisement networks to analytics tools to third-party APIs necessary for page function. All of these components may leak information to third parties about the users' current activity. We are attempting to quantify this information leakage through a policy written in the Bro IDS. Preliminary analysis paints a bleak picture, as more than 1 percent of all HTTP requests observed by ICSI users are deliberately leaking information just through Google Analytics alone.
This NSF-funded center is a joint effort with researchers at UC San Diego focused on the growing problem of large-scale subversion of Internet systems. The purview of CCIED is to: (1) analyze this threat, spanning the range from theoretical models to empirical assessments to potential innovations that threaten to develop; (2) devise defenses, both point-wise (for single systems or sites) and more globally; and (3) investigate the surrounding legal and policy issues that in practice affect and constrain approaches for countering the threat.
