The Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Proposed Research Group (DINRG) investigates open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity management, name resolution, resource/asset ownership management, and resource discovery. The focus of DINRG is on infrastructure services that can benefit from decentralization or that are difficult to realize in local, potentially connectivity-constrained networks.
The Internet was designed as a distributed, decentralized system. For example, intra- and inter-domain routing, DNS, and so on were designed to operate in a distributed manner. However, over time the dominant deployment model for applications and some infrastructure services evolved to become more centralized and hierarchical. Some of the increase in centralization is due to business models that rely on centralized accounting and administration.
However, we are simultaneously seeing the evolution of use cases (e.g., certain IoT deployments) that cannot work (or which work poorly) in centralized deployment scenarios along with the evolution of decentralized technologies which leverage new cryptographic infrastructures, such as DNSSEC, or which use novel, cryptographically-based distributed consensus mechanisms, such as a number of different ledger technologies. For example, these use cases include identity/trust management leveraging reputation for authentication, authorization and decentralized management of shared resources.
The evolution of distributed ledger technologies and the platforms that leverage them has given rise to the development of decentralized communication and infrastructure systems, and experiments with the same. Some examples include name resolution (Namecoin, Ethereum Name Service), identity management (OneName?), distributed storage (IPFS, MaidSafe?), distributed applications, or DApps (Blockstack), and IP address allocation and delegation.
These systems differ with respect to the problem they are solving, the specific technologies that they apply, the consensus algorithms that are employed, and the incentives that are built into the system. Now is a good time to investigate these systems from an Internet technologies perspective, and to connect the domain expertise in the IRTF and IETF with the distributed systems and decentralized ledgers community.
| Time | Topic | Presenter | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Welcome, Intro, Agenda Bashing | Melinda, Dirk | 10 min |
| 09:40 | Secure Open Federation for the Internet Everywhere | George Polyzos | 30 min |
| 10:10 | Decentralized Computing Environments | Michal Krol | 30 min |
| 10:40 | Break (no refreshments provided) | ||
| 11:10 | Distributed Authenticated Mapping | Sydney Li, Colin Man, Jean-Luc Watson | 30 min |
| 11:40 | Blockchain as an Audit-Able Communication Channel | Shigeya Suzuki | 30 min |
| 12:10 | Distributed Name Rewriting | Christian Tschudin | 20 min |
| 12:30 | Lunch (self-organized) | ||
| 14:00 | NDSS DISS Workshop preview | Dirk | 20 min |
| 14:20 | Decentralized Internet Infrastructure: Discussion on research scope, use cases, next steps | Melinda, Dirk | 120 min |
| 16:20 | Summary, Wrap up, Next Steps | Melinda, Dirk | 10 min |
| 16:30 | ** End of Meeting** |
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Melinda Shore | Fastly |
| Dirk Kutscher | Huawei |
| Christian Tschudin | Universität Basel |
| Carsten Bormann | Universität Bremen |
| Michal Krol | University College London |
| George Polyzos | Athens University of Economy and Business |
| Sydney Li | Stanford University |
| Colin Man | Stanford University |
| Jean-Luc Watson | Stanford University |
| David Mazières | Stanford University |
| Shigeya Suzuki | Keio University |
| Vishnu Ram | Independent Consultant |
| Mat Ford | Internet Society |
| Lijun Dong | Huawei |
| Paul Hoffman | ICANN |
list of past meetings with links to presentation material
The content of this page was last updated on 2018-02-24. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2023-01-24.