Publications

Intertrust: establishing inter-zone trust relationships

Published in ICN 22, 2022

An NDN network is made of named entities with various trust relations between each other. Entities are organized into trust zones. Each trust zone contains the entities under the same administrative control. This work-in-progress explores an approach to establishing trust relations between trust zones.

Recommended citation: Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Hongcheng Xie, Yekta Kocaoğullar, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. Intertrust: establishing inter-zone trust relationships. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 180–182. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3559489

A type-theoretic model on NDN-TLV encoding

Published in ICN 22, 2022

In Named-Data Networking (NDN), all packets are encoded in the Type-Length-Value (TLV) format. TLV encoding and decoding are implemented in every NDN library, and used by all applications and forwarders. Therefore, formal analysis of TLV encoding can assist NDN software development in the simplification of the code base, analysis of the performance, and improvement of robustness.

Recommended citation: Xinyu Ma, Alexander Afanasyev, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. A type-theoretic model on NDN-TLV encoding. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3558093

CertRevoke: a certificate revocation framework for named data networking

Published in ICN 22, 2022

Named Data Networking (NDN) secures network communications by requiring all data packets to be signed upon production. This requirement makes usable and efficient NDN certificate issuance and revocation essential for NDN operations. In this paper, we first investigate and clarify core concepts related to NDN certificate revocation, then proceed with the design of CertRevoke, an NDN certificate revocation framework. CertRevoke utilizes naming conventions and trust schema to ensure certificate owners and issuers legitimately produce in-network cacheable records for revoked certificates. We evaluate the security properties and performance of CertRevoke through case studies. Our results show that deploying CertRevoke in an operational NDN network is feasible.

Recommended citation: Tianyuan Yu, Hongcheng Xie, Siqi Liu, Xinyu Ma, Xiaohua Jia, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. CertRevoke: a certificate revocation framework for named data networking. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3558079

Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security

Published in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this article, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home Internet of Things (IoT) system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This approach enables direct, secure, one-to-one, and one-to-many Device-to-Device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish–subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

Recommended citation: Z. Zhang, T. Yu, X. Ma, Y. Guan, P. Moll and L. Zhang, "Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 15, pp. 13808-13822, 1 Aug.1, 2022, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980

YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon

Published in ICN 21, 2021

We have developed YaNFD as a new software packet forwarder for NDN. YaNFD achieves compatibility with existing NDN applications and forwarders, as well as high throughput. YaNFD features multi-threaded forwarding, a smaller and more streamlined codebase compared to existing implementations, and can be managed using existing NDN forwarder management utilities and protocols. In this paper, we discuss our implementation, including how it differs from previous forwarders based upon lessons learned during their development and use over the span of multiple years. Additionally, we present the lessons learned from our experience developing a new forwarder for NDN from the ground up.

Recommended citation: Eric Newberry, Xinyu Ma, and Lixia Zhang. 2021. YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460417.3482969

GitSync: distributed version control system on NDN

Published in ICN 21, 2021

Git is designed as a distributed version control system which has been widely used. However, most of the existing projects use a workflow where developers have to synchronize with a central server. This poster explores the possibility of a truly distributed git platform, dubbed GitSync, by making git run over Named-data Networking (NDN). GitSync runs a peer-to-peer protocol to get rid of central servers, therefore enabling higher availability when not all users are connected to cloud all the time. Therefore GitSync eliminates single point of failure and can continue operation over unstable connectivity and network partition.

Recommended citation: Xinyu Ma and Lixia Zhang. 2021. GitSync: distributed version control system on NDN. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 121–123. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460417.3483372

Evolving intelligent devices for the future via named data networking

Published in XRDS 26, 2019

As the numbers and capabilities of networked devices continue to grow, they will play an increasingly important role in daily life. Ensuring security and usability will be the first and foremost challenge; Named Data Networking can help address this challenge through localized trust, usable security, and autoconfiguration.

Recommended citation: Zhiyi Zhang, Edward Lu, Yu Guan, Tianxiang Li, Xinyu Ma, Zhaoning Kong, and Lixia Zhang. 2019. Evolving intelligent devices for the future via named data networking. XRDS 26, 1 (Fall 2019), 36–39. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351482 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351482