The past 20 years have seen the Internet evolve from a network connecting academics, to a critical part of our daily lives. The Internet now supports extremely popular services, such as online social networks and user generated content, in addition to critical services such as electronic medical records and power grid control. With so many users depending on the Internet, ensuring that data is delivered dependably is paramount. However, dependability of the Internet is threatened by the dual challenges of ensuring (1) data in transit cannot be intercepted or dropped by a malicious entity and (2) services are not impacted by unreliability of network components. This thesis takes an end-to-end approach and addresses these challenges at both the core and edge of the network. We make the following two contributions:
A strategy for securing the Internet's routing system. First, we consider the challenge of improving security of interdomain routing. In the core of the network, a key challenge is enticing multiple competing organizations to agree on, and adopt, new protocols. To address this challenge we present our three-step strategy that creates economic incentives for deploying a secure routing protocol (S*BGP). The cornerstone of our strategy is S*BGP's impact on network traffic, which we harness to drive revenue-generating traffic toward ISPs that deploy S*BGP, thus creating incentives for deployment.
Empirical study of data center network reliability. Second, we consider the dual challenge of improving network reliability in data centers hosting popular content. The scale at which these networks are deployed presents challenges to building reliable networks, however, since they are administered by a single organization, they also provide opportunity to innovate. We take a first step towards designing a more reliable network infrastructure by characterizing failures in a data center network comprised of tens of data centers and thousands of devices.
Through dialogue with relevant stakeholders on the Internet (e.g., standardization bodies and large content providers), these contributions have resulted in real world impact. This impact has included the creation of an FCC working group, and improved root cause analysis in a large content provider network.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/34013 |
| Date | 11 December 2012 |
| Creators | Gill, Phillipa |
| Contributors | Ganjali, Yashar |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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