From: Kate Everitt (everitt@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 15 2004 - 08:58:07 PST
(I've been sending this in since 7:55. I'm sorry if there are duplicates)
Upgrading Transport Protocols using Untrusted Mobile
Code
Review: Katherine Everitt
This paper presents STP, a system for communicating
mobile code between endpoints.
The strongest point about this paper was that it
addresses an important problem in networks research.
They describe a broad solution which has several
valuable properties: it will support the spread of new
protocols without requiring the routers to be
upgraded, (which is much faster), it will allow both
endpoints to be upgraded (because this is sometimes
necessary) and it will allow various endpoints to use
the protocol that is best for their traffic, not
necessarily a general solution. The most important
issue addressed by the paper is maintaining security
for mobile code by designing a safe API which will not
allow malicious code to harm the kernel or take over
network bandwidth. They use a type safe language,
Cyclone, to achieve memory safety.
However, there are several disadvantages that need to
be taken into account. For example, this algorithm
will complicate router code and provide more overhead
for nodes. Also, this solution is good because it
works under current conditions, but some current or
future network protocols might not be spreadable by
this method, and might cause problems for this
solution. One example is a wireless protocols like
WTCP that don’t treat loss as congestion. Other
protocols may provide more access than STP requires,
and this has the effect of limiting the protocols we
can use to those who use STP’s API, which could skew
the protocols being tried out. This solution also
require developers to do quite a bit of work to take
advantage of the mobile code approach.
This paper is very relevant to today, as it addresses
a real problem and provides a clever solution that
allows us to test out new solutions.
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