Security: GENI project; a "secure web" framework

Princeton Researchers Envision a More Secure Internet
Princeton University (02/15/08) Riordan, Teresa
Some of Princeton's top brains have divergent ideas about fortifying the security of the Internet, with Larry Peterson offering the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) as a much-needed platform for investigating and validating potential security solutions. Peterson says GENI is particularly important as a tool that would allow the research community to significantly shape the Internet's future and counter industry's increasingly pervasive influence. He believes the network offers the optimum path for tackling the Internet's security challenges, arguing that "the network needs to be able to quarantine compromised machines so that we can limit their collateral damage." Edward Felten, director of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy, focuses on short-term, high-impact research, and is convinced that many of the Internet's security problems can be traced to how technology is used rather than the technology itself. Ruby Lee, who heads the Princeton Architecture Lab for Multimedia and Security, stresses that security should be an element of system design, and wants to embed basic security features within hardware. Her lab has demonstrated that such an innovation can be accomplished without hiking up the hardware's power consumption or impacting its performance. Felten does not agree with Peterson and Lee's contention that online security can be adequately shored up by trust features incorporated into hardware or networks, while Princeton computer scientist and GENI participant Jennifer Rexford sees advantages to approaches espoused by all three researchers. "GENI would really open up the intellectual space in thinking about the Internet," she says, even as she works on incremental security enhancements such as the improvement of routing protocols.
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