skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Sidekick: In-Network Assistance for Secure End-to-End Transport Protocols
In response to concerns about protocol ossification and privacy, post-TCP transport protocols such as QUIC and WebRTC include end-to-end encryption and authentication at the transport layer. This makes their packets opaque to middleboxes, freeing the transport protocol to evolve but preventing some in-network innovations and performance improvements. This paper describes sidekick protocols: an approach to in-network assistance for opaque transport protocols where in-network intermediaries help endpoints by sending information adjacent to the underlying connection, which remains opaque and unmodified on the wire. A key technical challenge is how the sidekick connection can efficiently refer to ranges of packets of the underlying connection without the ability to observe cleartext sequence numbers. We present a mathematical tool called a quACK that concisely represents a selective acknowledgment of opaque packets, without access to cleartext sequence numbers. In real-world and emulation-based evaluations, the sidekick improved performance in several scenarios: early retransmission over lossy Wi-Fi paths, proxy acknowledgments to save energy, and a path-aware congestion-control mechanism we call PACUBIC that emulates a “split” connection.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2039070 2045714 2028733 1763256
PAR ID:
10512227
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Editor(s):
Vanbever, Laurent; Zhang, Irene
Publisher / Repository:
USENIX Association
Date Published:
ISBN:
978-1-939133-39-7
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Santa Clara, CA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, The Twenty-first ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2022))
    In response to ossification and privacy concerns, post-TCP transport protocols such as QUIC are designed to be “paranoid”—opaque to meddling middleboxes by encrypting and authenticating the header and payload—making it impossible for Performance-Enhancing Proxies (PEPs) to provide the same assistance as before. We propose a research agenda towards an alternate approach to PEPs, creating a sidecar protocol that is loosely-coupled to the unchanged and opaque, underlying transport protocol. The key technical challenge to sidecar protocols is how to usefully refer to the packets of the underlying connection without ossification. We have made progress on this problem by creating a tool we call a quACK (quick ACK), a concise representation of a multiset of numbers that can be used to efficiently decode the randomly-encrypted packet contents a sidecar has received. We implement the quACK and discuss how to achieve several applications with this approach: alternate congestion control, ACK reduction, and PEP-to-PEP retransmission across a lossy subpath. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, IEEE)
    Millimeter wave (mmWave) access networks have the potential to meet the high-throughput and low-latency needs of immersive applications. However, due to the highly directional nature of the mmWave beams and their susceptibility to beam misalignment and blockage resulting from user movements and rotations, the associated mmWave links are vulnerable to large channel fluctuations. These fluctuations result in disproportion- ately adverse effects on performance of transport layer protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). To overcome this challenge, we propose a network layer solution, COded Taking And Giving (COTAG) scheme to sustain low-latency and high- throughput end-to-end TCP performance in dually connected networks. In particular, COTAG creates network encoded packets at the network gateway and each access point (AP) aiming to adaptively take the spare bandwidth on each link for transmis- sion. Further, if one link bandwidth drops due to user movements, COTAG actively abandons the transmission opportunity by conditionally dropping packets. Consequently, COTAG actively adapts to link quality changes in mmWave access network and enhances the TCP performance without jeopardizing the latency of immersive content delivery. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed COTAG, we conduct experiments using off-the- shelf APs and network simulations. The evaluation results show that COTAG improves end-to-end TCP performance significantly on both throughput and latency. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, ICN '20: Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking)
    Named-Data Transport (NDT) is introduced to provide efficient content delivery by name over the existing IP Internet. NDT consists of the integration of three end-to-end architectural components: The first connection-free reliable transport protocol, the Named-Data Transport Protocol (NDTP); minor extensions to the Domain Name System (DNS) to include records containing manifests describing content; and transparent caches that track pending requests for content. NDT uses receiver-driven requests (Interests) to request content and NDT proxies that provide transparent caching of content while enforcing privacy. The performance of NDT, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and Named-Data Networking (NDN) is compared using off-the-shelf implementations in the ns-3 simulator. The results demonstrate that NDT outperforms TCP and is as efficient as NDN, but without making any changes to the existing Internet routing infrastructure. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; (, AVS Quantum Science)
    We simulate entanglement sharing between two end-nodes of a linear chain quantum network using SeQUeNCe, an open-source simulation package for quantum networks. Our focus is on the rate of entanglement generation between the end-nodes with many repeaters with a finite quantum memory lifetime. Numerical and analytical simulations show limits of connection performance for a given number of repeaters involved, memory lifetimes, the distance between the end-nodes, and an entanglement management protocol. Our findings demonstrate that the performance of quantum connection depends highly on the entanglement management protocol, which schedules entanglement generation and swapping, resulting in the final end-to-end entanglement. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management)
    Despite years of research on transport protocols, the tussle between in-network and end-to-end congestion control has not been solved. This debate is due to the variance of conditions and assumptions in different network scenarios, e.g., cellular versus data center networks. Recently, the community has proposed a few transport protocols driven by machine learning, nonetheless limited to end-to-end approaches. In this paper, we present Owl, a transport protocol based on reinforcement learning, whose goal is to select the proper congestion window learning from end-to-end features and network signals, when available. We show that our solution converges to a fair resource allocation after the learning overhead. Our kernel implementation, deployed over emulated and large scale virtual network testbeds, outperforms all benchmark solutions based on end-to-end or in-network congestion control. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email