Event of Interest: Tuesday, 5/6, Packard 101, 4 pm (Refreshments provided)
David Cheriton, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
Title: Rethinking Trust and Accountability for the Internet: Making "Best Efforts" really mean Best Effort
The Internet changes the way we live, work and play. But, would you bet your life on it? Perhaps you already are, or soon will be. The Internet has been sufficiently successful to eliminate competing communication systems, but is it good enough to run critical infrastructure systems such as air traffic control? I claim it is not; yet we have no choice - it is happening, or going to happen. Therefore, the Internet needs to provide services that allow critical infrastructure distributed applications to be trusted to work correctly, and to hold accountable attempts to interfere with these applications. I also claim that the Internet was never been properly designed to support the end-to-end principle properly.
In this talk, I present what I think are the critical problems with the Internet for its destined role, some solutions, how they solve the end-to-end problems with the Internet, and why I do not see any alternatives to the Internet or these solutions. A foundation to these solutions is, somewhat surprisingly, loose source routing - more associated with security problems than solutions, and part of the original IP design. So, not a clean slate, but signficant course corrections so the Internet does not clean our slate.
Bio: David Cheriton is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research includes the areas of high-performance scalable distributed systems, object-oriented software structuring, internet architecture and protocols and hardware-software interaction, particularly at the operating system level. Prof. Cheriton was also a co-founder of Granite Systems, acquired by Cisco Systems, and Kealia acquired by Sun Microsystems. He has also been a technical advisor with Google, Vmware, Cisco and Sun and a number of startup companies. Prof. Cheriton received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 1978. He has been at Stanford since 1981, working with Andy Bechstolsheim before Andy founded Sun, with Jim Clark before Jim founded Silicon Graphics, and Len Bosack before Len founded Cisco, passing on some great opportunities because of the strange lure of academia.
--
New Book: Jonathan Zittrain, Oxford. The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It. (Not yet reviewed.)
--
Thursday, 17 April, Noon-7pm. FCC Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet, at Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
--
7 April. Avron and Shirley will hold office hours every Thursday from 3:00-4:00pm in the Bytes Cafe, in the Packard EE Building, directly across Serra Street from the Gates Building. Feel free to come by to talk about your CS73N projects, website editing tools, or the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
