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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For Immediate Release, September 25, 2002 CONTACT: Kristen Collins, MIT News Office Phone: [phone], Email: [e-mail]

MIT, BERKELEY, ICSI, NYU, and RICE LAUNCH

THE IRIS PROJECT
National Science Foundation Awards $12 Million Award

to Develop a Resilient Internet Infrastructure

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 25, 2002 -- MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science, together with The University of California at Berkeley, The International Computer Science Institute, New York University, and Rice University, today announced that it has received a $12 million Information Technology Research (ITR) award from the National Science Foundation to launch the Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (Iris) project, a far-reaching joint research project to develop a secure, decentralized Internet infrastructure that is resistant to failure and attack.

As concerns rise over the vulnerability of the Internet and other mission-critical networked applications to malicious attack, securing government, corporate and industrial distributed applications has become a high priority for governments, institutions and businesses worldwide. Today’s traditional client-server approach to distributed systems suffers from significant security and scalability problems when hosting complex applications over wide area networks.
Led by Frans Kaashoek (MIT) and Scott Shenker (ICSI), the Iris project adopts a very different approach, aiming to use distributed hash table (DHT) technology to develop a robust common framework and infrastructure for distributed applications without creating central points of vulnerability. The secure networks that emerge from this project will streamline distributed application programming and offset development expenses.
The Iris project will investigate two conjectures: that a wide variety of distributed applications can be built upon a DHT platform with application-independent, unconstrained keys and values; and that these applications can inherit basic levels of security, robustness, ease of operation, and scaling from the technology.
The first phase of the project involves developing DHT algorithms and building a large-scale open testbed equipped with some enabling libraries and a few sample applications. Researchers will then be encouraged to build—and break—more advanced applications on the network. Testing the second conjecture will involve developing techniques that enable applications to maintain their performance and security even when operating over nodes controlled by hackers.
Acting as the cornerstone of the new robust shared infrastructure, DHT technology will securely orchestrate data retrieval and computation on open-ended large-scale networks such as the Internet, even when the individual nodes on the network are insecure or unreliable.
The underlying network will also be self-configuring, allowing the addition and removal of nodes without manual oversight while also automatically balancing excess loads across the network. The desired end-result is a large reliable distributed system composed of inexpensive and unreliable components.
While one of the immediate goals of the research is to protect widely-distributed applications from eavesdropping, tampering, and malicious destruction, long-term goals for the future of software may prove even more important. Researchers foresee the technology being used as the platform for robust, global Internet applications, vastly improved wide area storage networks, and more.
“A peer-to-peer approach to distributed systems has gained momentum in recent years because it offers scalability and robustness, but a lot of critical research problems remain,” says Professor Victor Zue, Director of the MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. “With some of the best minds in this community collaborating and with sustained support from NSF, significant advances will undoubtedly be made.”
The Iris project includes a multidisciplinary team of researchers from fields including networking, algorithms, security, systems, and databases including Hari Balakrishnan (MIT), Peter Druschel (Rice), Joe Hellerstein (Berkeley), Frans Kaashoek (MIT), David Karger (MIT), Dick Karp (Berkeley/ICSI), John Kubiatowicz (Berkeley), Barbara Liskov (MIT), David Mazieres (NYU), Robert Morris (MIT), Scott Shenker (ICSI), and Ion Stoica (Berkeley).

In addition to directing pure research, the Iris project intends to build outreach and education programs designed to steer graduate and undergraduate computing programs toward distributed applications. Students at each of the participating institutions will be encouraged to join the DHT testbed. The group hopes to build upon student interest in P2P technologies to create the mission-critical distributed applications of the future.

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