|
OSDI '04 — Abstract
Pp. 215–230 of the Proceedings
Middleboxes No Longer Considered Harmful
Michael Walfish, Jeremy Stribling, Maxwell Krohn, Hari Balakrishnan, and Robert Morris, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley, and ICSI
Abstract
Intermediate network elements, such as network address
translators (NATs), firewalls, and transparent caches are now
commonplace. The usual reaction in the network architecture community
to these so-called middleboxes is a combination of scorn (because
they violate important architectural principles) and dismay (because
these violations make the Internet less flexible). While we
acknowledge these concerns, we also
recognize that middleboxes have become an Internet fact of life for
important reasons. To retain their functions
while eliminating their dangerous side-effects, we propose an extension
to the Internet architecture, called the Delegation-Oriented
Architecture (DOA), that not only allows, but also facilitates, the
deployment of middleboxes. DOA involves two relatively modest changes to
the current architecture: (a) a set of references that are carried in packets
and serve as persistent host identifiers and
(b) a way to resolve these references to delegates chosen by the referenced
host.
- View the full text of this paper in HTML and
PDF.
Until December 2005, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2004 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
