csperkins.org

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 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.

Weiteng Chen giving the ANRP prize talk at IETF 106 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).