IRTF activities co-located with IETF 106
2 December 2019
The IETF 106 meeting took place in Singapore in November 2019. Most of the IRTF research groups met co-located with that meeting. We also made one Applied Networking Research Prize award.
All of the IRTF research groups, with the exception of the Decentralized Internet Infrastructure Research Group, met in person in Singapore. The Computation in the Network Research Group has completed its year as a proposed research group and underwent a review by the IRTF chair and the IAB before being promoted to a full research group. Highlights from the other research groups included:
- the Crypto Forum Research Group continued the password authenticated key exchange (PAKE) algorithm selection process;
- the GAIA group discussed several community network initiatives;
- the Human Rights Protocol Considerations Research Group heard excellent talks on Measuring and Analyzing National AS Choke Points, and on 5G security;
- the Congestion Control Research Group is proposing to start formal adoption of drafts as work items, with a focus on publishing more experimental RFCs;
- the Network Management Research Group had a busy meeting on intent-based networking, and is starting to discuss a proposed charter revision to broaden the scope of the group to cover some aspects of AI-based network management;
-
the
Network Coding
Research Group had updates on existing works, plus a new discussion
of its relation to the LOOPS
activity starting in IETF;
- the Path Aware Networking group is concluding its survey of open questions in path aware networking and its review of obstacles to deployment of path aware protocol;
- the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Group had research presentations on data privacy risks of machine learning and on preserving privacy via homomorphic encryption, amongst others;
- and the Quantum Internet Research Group had a relatively short but productive meeting discussing the principles of quantum networking and how to establish paths over which entangled state can be exchanged.
The Thing-to-Thing, Information-Centric Networking, and Measurement and Analysis of Protocols research groups also met, with typically busy agendas. The meeting materials and minutes are available from the IETF Datatracker.
The Applied Networking Research Prize
(ANRP) is awarded for recent results in applied networking research
that are relevant for transitioning into shipping Internet products and
related standardization efforts. We made one ANRP award at IETF 106, to
Weiteng Chen from the University of California, Riverside, for his work
on wireless network security. Weiteng's paper
Off-path TCP exploit: how
wireless routers can jeopardize your secrets shows how timing side
channels in IEEE 802.11 networks, due to the half-duplex nature of the
MAC layer, can be used to perform TCP injection attacks. A recording of
Weiteng's prize talk
is available IETF YouTube channel.
Finally, the IRTF Open Meeting included some intensive discussions about the relation between the IRTF and IETF, moving work between IRTF and IETF, and how can the IRTF help academia (and vice versa).