Lecture 1: The Current Internet and its Problems

Lecture 1:The Current Internet and its Problems www.psirp.org D.Sc. Arto Karila Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) arto.karila@hiit.fi T-110.6120 – Special Course on Data Communications Software: Publish/Subscribe Internetworking

Contents • Practical arrangements • Internet history • Why the Internet only just works • Other issues • Evolution vs. revolution • PSIRP & ICT SHOK

Practicalities Welcome to the course! • Staff • Professor: Arto Karila, D.Sc. arto.karila@hiit.fi • Assistant: Mark Ain, M.Sc. mark.ain@hiit.fi We will have several guest lecturers throughout the course. • Language • English • Lecture schedule: • Mon 14:15 – 16:00 T2 • Wed 12:15 – 14:00 T2

Practicalities (cont’d) • Prequisites • Basic understanding of internetworking concepts and principles • Targeted to senior and graduate students • Credits • 4 ECTS • Grading • Pass/fail • Assessment • Active participation in the lectures (mandatory attendance) • Completion of a weekly learning diary • Completion of a questionnaire at the beginning and conclusion of the course Your grade is determined by the number and quality of learning diaries and questionnaires submitted. If we have grounds to suspect that you haven’t put a reasonable effort into your submission, or if we discover that your submission is doctored in any way, you will receive a failing mark. The surveys and questionnaires are interesting and informative! Help us, help yourselves; take them seriously!

Practicalities (cont’d) • Academic honesty • http://information.tkk.fi/en/studies/cse/teachers/guidelines/ “…dishonest behaviour is defined as practice where the student's purpose is to give false representation of his/her own or other student's knowledge and in an attempt to influence the grading of the course. Examples of dishonest behaviour include cheating in an exam, copying someone else's project work or taking an exam for someone else.” All cases of academic dishonesty will be dealt with harshly. The bottom line: it’s not worth it.

Practical arrangements • Internet history • Why the Internet only just works • Other issues • Evolution vs. revolution • PSIRP & ICT SHOK

Internet 2006-01-15

History of the Internet… 1957: Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was founded after the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1968: ARPA started the development of the ARPANET 1969: The first four nodes of the ARPANET were connected (the first message: ”lo”) 1974: Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf defined the basic Internet architecture (TCP/IP) 1975: DARPA started the development of Internet technology 1983: On 1/1/1983 the whole ARPANET was converted to TCP/IP

History of the Internet (cont’d) 1988: FUNET joined the Internet 1989: DataNet (by Telecom Finland) was published and BGP-1 defined 1990: NSFNET was founded 1991: The first World Wide Web (WWW) client Mosaic was published at CERN 1993: CIDR and BGP-4 were adopted 1990’s: The Internet secured its position as the leading network architecture 2000: The number of Internet hosts exceeded 100,000,000

Growth of the Internet

Why the Internet only just works See: Why the Internet only just works, M. Handley, BT Technology Journal, Vol 24 No 3, July 2006 Throughout its life, the Internet has only just worked and all of the major changes have been made at the last possible time CIDR and NAT were introduced because of the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space These were supposed to be temporary solutions, waiting for IPv6 to break through, but they have become permanent At the same time firewalls proliferated

Why the Internet only just works (cont’d) • The original end-to-end principle of the Internet no longer works because of the middle boxes (firewalls and NAT) • This has lead to it being virtually impossible to make any changes to the transport layer (TCP/UDP) • This has lead to a vicious circle: • Developers cannot use a new protocol because it cannot traverse firewalls and NAT • It is not worth while for the developers of firewalls and NAT to change the middle boxes because there are no users of new transport protocols

Problems with the current Internet • No major changes have been made to the core protocols of the Internet since 1993 • The core protocols of the Internet are ossified while the needs have developed significantly • Among the well understood requirements for the Internet are the following: • Multicast • Mobility • Multi-homing • Security • Quality of Service (QoS)

Problems with the current Internet (cont’d) • Solutions to the needs listed on the previous slide have been developed but not widely deployed • Operators don’t have incentives to bring new features to the market because they are only useful if they are interoperable with other operators, in which case they give no competitive advantage • Junk mail (Spam) is a growing problem • With the proliferation of Voice over IP (VoIP), junk calls (Spam over IP Telephony – SPIT) are growing

Problems with the current Internet (cont’d) • Worms, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, and several other types of malware are spreading fast throughout the Internet • Phishing is a growing problem • Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks are very common and there still is no efficient defense strategy against Distributed DoS (DDoS)

Problems with the current Internet (cont’d) • The current inter-operator routing protocol BGP-4 does not fulfill modern requirements but there is no successor to it in sight • Tier-1 operators (AT&T, MCI, Sprint, C&W etc.) are a group of about a dozen global operators with mutual peering agreements • In Practice they form a cartel, which wants to cement the market and is not advocating development

IPv6 • IPv6 was defined in 1995 and expected to spread fast • It is still hardly used in Western countries • The main improvement of IPv6 is moving from 32-bit to 128-bit addresses • IPv6 was defined at a time when nobody could foresee all of the uses and needs of the Internet that we have now • CIDR and NAT have eased the shortage of IPv4 addresses but now they are really running out • The transition to IPv6 will be a long one and it won’t solve most of the problems

Trust and reputation • Trust is irrational – however, there is a mathematical foundation for it • The Internet was developed for a community where everybody was assumed trustworthy • Now that the Internet is used by everybody, it is vital to enable communication between parties that don’t trust each other • We need mechanisms by which people and companies can build and evaluate trust • Good reputation can be made an asset worth protecting • Combining privacy and reputation is challenging

Microeconomics Over the past ten years, microeconomics have grown in importance We need economic mechanisms that encourage people to do good for the community The Internet was developed with public funds for research and education without any commercial considerations If we want to inject resources into the network, it must be possible for the party paying for them to also receive (some of) the revenues We need to create ways for companies and people to improve their own economies by doing things beneficial for the community

Unsolicited traffic • A rather simple solution to spam would be to sign all e-mail headers and white-list senders • An inherent problem of the Internet is that it operates on the terms of the sender – anybody can send to anybody and the network makes a best effort to deliver • In the publish/subscribe model the “sender” publishes and “recipient” subscribes – you can now avoid spam by not subscribing to it • Now the subscriber can be anonymous while the publisher needs to have a name • Efficient distribution of multimedia is possible by using multicast and caching

Evolution vs. revolution • The Internet has developed from the 1970’s in an evolutionary way, with no big changes • As concluded before, this has led into a situation where it is very hard to make changes to the core protocols • Among researchers and developers of the Internet, there is a growing opinion that something fundamental has to be done at some point • It the Internet was to be redesigned from scratch, it would probably be very different than what the current Internet has evolved to today

Evolution vs. revolution (cont’d) • Various clean-slate solutions are current research topics and some of them may lead into a new Internet • It is possible that all the protocol layers, including the Internet Protocol, will change • However, it looks like any new solution would have to be able to operate as overlay above the existing IP infrastructure, in order to have a change to proliferate • The publish/subscribe paradigm (pub/sub) mentioned earlier is one of the most promising new paradigms

Routing Example: PSIRP • PSIRP – Publish/Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm • Envision a system that dynamically adapts to evolving concerns and needs of their participating users • Publish–subscribe based internetworking architecture restores the balance of network economics incentives between the sender and the receiver • Recursive use of publish-subscribe paradigm enables dynamic change of roles between actors Security network economics Unification of wireline and wireless

PSIRP Approach Clean-slate design… • Question ALL fundamentals • Challenge our thinking • Take nothing for granted, including industry structures • Clear vision …with late binding (to reality) • Consider migration and evolvability in separate work items • How to get our design into real deployments, e.g., overlay vs. IP replacement? • Even consider necessary evolution of industry (& regulatory) structures • How do industries need to evolve in certain scenarios?

WP 4 Testbed WP 1 Routing WP 2 Transport WP 3 Information Networking WP 0 Management & cross-work WP 5 Dissemination ICT SHOK Future Internet Program Mission: Enhance the Internet technology and ecology as a platform for innovation while providing strong governance over the use of the network resources and information in such a way that especially mobile use of the network and its services will be natively supported • Start: April 2008 • 50 person years/year • + SMEs

Thank you for your attention! Questions? Comments?

Lecture 1: The Current Internet and its Problems