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XIA addresses the growing diversity of network use models, the need for trustworthy communication, and the growing set of stakeholders who coordinate their activities to provide Internet services. XIA addresses these needs by exploring the technical challenges in creating a single network that offers inherent support for communication between current communicating principals--including hosts, content, and services--while accommodating unknown future entities. For each type of principal, XIA defines a narrow waist that dictates the application programming interface (API) for communication and the network communication mechanisms. XIA provides intrinsic security in which the integrity and authenticity of communication is guaranteed. XIA enables flexible context-dependent mechanisms for establishing trust between the communicating principals, bridging the gap between human and intrinsically secure identifiers. This project includes user experiments to evaluate and refine the interface between the network and users, and studies that analyze the relationship between technical design decisions, and economic incentives and public policy.
Please refer to our NSDI'12 paper (XIA: Efficient Support for Evolvable Internetworking) or (slides).
The XIA prototype models the XIP network protocol stack, C & Python socket APIs for XIA (Xsocket API), and network bootstrap/support services (e.g., routing, initial host configuration, and name service). The prototype is implemented on top of the Click modular router.
The XIA prototype allows users to do following:
- Set up an XIA network (e.g., local machine, VMs, GENI testbeds)
- Run XIA applications over the XIA network
- Write XIA applications (via Xsocket API)
- (For advanced users) Add new modules/codes to the prototype
In October 2012, we demoed XIA running on the GENI network at the 15th GENI Engineering Conference.
