MyNet/UIA: Secure, Peer-to-Peer, Personal Overlay Networks

The MyNet Project is a collaboration between the Nokia Pervasive Computing Group and the MIT UIA team (UIA=User Information Architecture). It is clear that personal devices such as mobile phones, digital music players, personal digital assistants, console gaming systems, and digital cameras have become commonplace in the lives of ordinary people. We believe that as these intelligent and networking capable devices proliferate -- security, ease of use and peer-to-peer connectivity will become increasingly important.

For example: if Alice meets Bob in a coffee shop, she should easily be able to share with him information or services located on any of her personal devices. These may be devices she carries with her or devices she owns but are located somewhere else, such as her home. Once Bob has been given access, he should be able to connect to Aliceld be able to impersonate Bob later, however, in order to gain access to the resources Alice choose to share with Bob.
Approach

The MyNet project will study and develop a network architecture, tools and applications for simple, secure, personal overlay networks. The User Information Architecture (UIA) is a new network architecture which is intended to allow global interaction and sharing among information devices. The UIA protocols are the foundation upon which the rest of the MyNet project work is layered. The UIA is based on two principles: (1) security is decoupled from physical connectivity and (2) establishment of trust is based on social connectivity.

The decoupling principle makes it safe to expose devices to the Internet. This is achieved by creating personal, private, overlay networks. The social-networking principle makes end-to-end cryptographic security possible without needing a universal public key infrastructure (PKI). Simple to use mechanisms will be developed that make it natural for users to leverage social relationships to choose how and with whom to share limited access to their devices and files.

Initially, the team will focus on:

(*) Functionality such as authorization and access control, integration of distributed middleware and service discovery protocols with gossip, multicast that is scoped to a personal overlay network, delegates for NAT/Firewall traversal (and maybe more);
(*) Intuitive mechanisms for "introducing" a device into a personal network and for granting some other user limited access to the resources of a personal network; user friendly personal network navigation and management GUIs and tools;
(*) Decentralized (and hopefully user friendly) personal network maintenance, debugging tools. Eventually we want to increase the ability of the personal networks and the distributed applications built on top to be self-healing...;
(*) Application composibility, i.e., device and service composition and end-user "programming";
(*) Port UIA to 770 and Series 60 v3;
(*) A few compelling (we hope) consumer and enterprise applications that demonstrate the value of this stuff.