Category Archives: Uncategorized

What do information centric networks, trusted execution environments, and digital watermarking have to do with privacy, the data economy, and their future?

Nikolaos Laoutaris, Costas Iordanou

Abstract

What if instead of having to implement controversial user tracking techniques, Internet advertising & marketing companies asked explicitly to be granted access to user data by name and category, such as Alice→Mobility→05-11-2020? The technology for implementing this already exists, and is none other than the Information Centric Networks (ICN), developed for over a decade in the framework of Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiatives. Beyond named access to personal data, ICN’s in-network storage capability can be used as a substrate for retrieving aggregated, anonymized data, or even for executing complex analytics within the network, with no personal data leaking outside. In this opinion article we discuss how ICNs combined with trusted execution environments and digital watermarking, can be combined to build a personal data overlay inter-network in which users will be able to control who gets access to their personal data, know where each copy of said data is, negotiate payments in exchange for data, and even claim ownership, and establish accountability for data leakages due to malfunctions or malice. Of course, coming up with concrete designs about how to achieve all the above will require a huge effort from a dedicated community willing to change how personal data are handled on the Internet. Our hope is that this opinion article can plant some initial seeds towards this direction.

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The case for model-driven interpretability of delay-based congestion control protocols

Muhammad Khan, Yasir Zaki, Shiva R. Iyer, Talal Ahamd, Thomas Poetsch, Jay Chen, Anirudh Sivaraman, Lakshmi Subramanian

Abstract

Analyzing and interpreting the exact behavior of new delay-based congestion control protocols with complex non-linear control loops is exceptionally difficult in highly variable networks such as cellular networks. This paper proposes a Model-Driven Interpretability (MDI) congestion control framework, which derives a model version of a delay-based protocol by simplifying a congestion control protocol’s response into a guided random walk over a two-dimensional Markov model. We demonstrate the case for the MDI framework by using MDI to analyze and interpret the behavior of two delay-based protocols over cellular channels: Verus and Copa. Our results show a successful approximation of throughput and delay characteristics of the protocols’ model versions across variable network conditions. The learned model of a protocol provides key insights into an algorithm’s convergence properties.

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Best CCR papers presented at SIGCOMM’18

Every year, the CCR Editorial board selects the two best paper that were published during the previous year (i.e. the July 2017, October 2017, January 2018 and April 2018 issues) for presentation during the SIGCOMM conference. During SIGCOMM’18, two CCR papers will be presented :

Both papers proposed a methodology, collected measurements and released artefacts to allow other researchers to build upon and extend the paper results. A recent study shows that a growing fraction of the papers published within our community contains artefacts (software, measurements datasets, …). CCR encourages the publications of such papers by allowing them to be longer than six pages.

Community feedback

Like most scientific journals, Computer Communication Review (CCR) publishes peer-reviewed papers. Reviewing papers takes time and the papers that appear in CCR have typically been submitted four months before their online publication. Once a paper is submitted, it is reviewed by a few experts in the field who assess the technical merits of the paper. If the paper supplies artefacts (software, datasets, …) additional reviewers also evaluate those artefacts. Those reviews and the associated discussions take time and often allow the authors to significantly improve the quality of their papers.

In parallel with their submission to CCR, some authors also distribute their paper to colleagues or post it on online repositories. To provide more feedback to such authors, we start a new experiment in CCR. Authors who submit papers that contain artefacts (software, datasets, …) can now opt for community feedback. In this case, the paper is quickly checked by the editor and if suitable it is posted on ccronline.sigcomm.org during the review process together with links to the additional material. We start this experiment with the following paper that is currently under review :

We hope that this new service will be useful for the community and encourage you to provide feedback to the authors through website comments. Feel free to also contact the editor by email if you have any suggestion or comment on this new service.