Clean-slate Approach Research Articles

Populist peacemaking: Trump's peace initiatives in the Middle East and the Balkans

Abstract With the rise of populist leaders around the world, populism's impact on foreign policy and international affairs has come into focus. Adding to this literature, we propose the concept of ‘populist peacemaking’, in which key tenets of populism, in style and substance, are projected onto the sphere of international mediation. We offer an analytical framework for understanding populist peacemaking consisting of three features. Firstly, populist peacemaking is characterized by a rejection of the ‘peacemaking elites’ and their established rules and practices, including international norms, a refutation of context-specific knowledge, and a clean-slate approach that disregards past peacemaking attempts and alienates other international mediators. Secondly, populist peacemaking employs aggrandized rhetoric and symbolism that puts the mediator—rather than the conflict parties—in the spotlight, thus integrating domestic politics into peacemaking. Finally, populist peacemaking frames the process as representing the volonté générale, i.e. serving the interests of the ‘pure people’ in the conflict-affected context. We illustrate this phenomenon empirically with a case-study of United States' peacemaking efforts during the Trump era, tracing initiatives pursued by US envoys in the Israeli–Palestinian and Kosovo–Serbia conflicts. From this analysis, populist peacemaking emerges as a distinct phenomenon, not to be subsumed under the heading of ‘illiberal peacemaking’.

BlockTrail: A Service for Secure and Transparent Blockchain-Driven Audit Trails

Audit trails are critical components in enterprise business applications, typically used for storing, tracking, and auditing data. Entities in the audit trail applications have weak trust boundaries, which expose them to various security risks and attacks. To harden the security and develop secure by design applications, blockchain technology has been recently introduced in the audit trails. Blockchains take a consensus-driven clean slate approach to equip audit trails with secure and transparent data processing, without a trusted intermediary. On a downside, blockchains significantly increase the space-time complexity of the audit trails, leading to high storage costs and low transaction throughput. In this article, we introduce BlockTrail, a novel blockchain architecture that fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of codependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the space-time complexity and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on the “practical Byzantine fault tolerance” protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is secure and efficient, with low storage footprint.

Automated Approaches Determine Solids Content in Drilling and Completions Fluids

This article, written by JPT Technology Editor Chris Carpenter, contains highlights of paper SPE 201368, “Automated Solids-Content Determination in Drilling and Completions Fluids,” by Sercan Gul, SPE, Ali Karimi Vajargah, and Eric van Oort, SPE, The University of Texas at Austin, et al., prepared for the 2020 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, originally scheduled to be held in Denver, 5–7 October. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Monitoring of low- and high-gravity-solids (LGS and HGS) content and maintaining these at ideal levels is essential for optimal drilling fluid performance, efficient hole cleaning and equivalent-circulating-density management, and prevention of failures of surface and downhole equipment during drilling. LGS and HGS monitoring in the field is currently accomplished using the API retort-kit measurement, which has certain drawbacks and is difficult to automate. In the complete paper, two new approaches are investigated to automate the LGS and HGS content measurements of drilling fluids, which potentially can replace the retort test. Introduction The conventional way to characterize LGS and HGS in the field is by using a retort-kit measurement specified in API Recommended Practices 13B-1 and 13B-2. The longevity of these tests is testament to the effectiveness of the API standards and the tests themselves in providing useful and practical field guidance. Despite their evident success, however, various downsides exist in current solids-content-testing methods. Retort-kit measurements present the following issues: - Difficulty in obtaining accurate and repeatable test results - Safety issues associated with laboratory testing at elevated temperatures (over 930°F) - Interpretive bias issues associated with test results, including the potential for deliberate manipulation of these results - Difficulty in automating the retort test for improved efficiency and safety The authors’ opinion is that automating antiquated API test protocols is not a useful practice. They write that a clean-slate approach would be better, in which a determination is made whether solids-content information can be provided in a novel and meaningful way using methods that deviate from standard API recommended practices. In the complete paper, the authors investigate a machine-learning (ML) and data-analytics method for this purpose in combination with a novel inline X-ray fluorescence (XRF) measurement method.

Unlearning and consent in the UK Fire and Rescue Service

Why does so much literature on unlearning ignore the people who do the unlearning? What would we understand differently if we focused on those people? Much of the existing literature argues that unlearning can only be achieved, and new knowledge acquired, if old knowledge is discarded: the clean slate approach. This might be a reasonable way of organising stock in a warehouse, where room needs to be created for new deliveries, but it is not an accurate description of a human system. This article draws on a detailed qualitative study of learning in the UK Fire and Rescue Service to challenge the clean slate approach and demonstrate that, not only did firefighters retain their old knowledge, they used it as a benchmark to assess new routines and practices. This meant that firefighters’ trust in, and consent to, innovation was key to successful implementation. In order to understand the social aspects of unlearning, this research focuses on the people involved as active agents, rather than passive recipients or discarders of knowledge.

Access Control Mechanisms in Named Data Networks

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) has recently emerged as a prominent candidate for the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) that addresses existing issues with the host-centric communication model of the current TCP/IP-based Internet. Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the most recent and active ICN architectures that provides a clean-slate approach for Internet communication. NDN provides intrinsic content security where security is directly provided to the content instead of communication channel. Among other security aspects, Access Control (AC) rules specify the privileges for the entities that can access the content. In TCP/IP-based AC systems, due to the client-server communication model, the servers control which client can access a particular content. In contrast, ICN-based networks use content names to drive communication and decouple the content from its original location. This phenomenon leads to the loss of control over the content, causing different challenges for the realization of efficient AC mechanisms. To date, considerable efforts have been made to develop various AC mechanisms in NDN. In this article, we provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of the AC mechanisms in NDN. We follow a holistic approach towards AC in NDN where we first summarize the ICN paradigm, describe the changes from channel-based security to content-based security, and highlight different cryptographic algorithms and security protocols in NDN. We then classify the existing AC mechanisms into two main categories: Encryption-based AC and Encryption-independent AC . Each category has different classes based on the working principle of AC (e.g., Attribute-based AC, Name-based AC, Identity-based AC). Finally, we present the lessons learned from the existing AC mechanisms and identify the challenges of NDN-based AC at large, highlighting future research directions for the community.

Sim-D: A SIMD Accelerator for Hard Real-Time Systems

Emerging safety-critical systems require high-performance data-parallel architectures and, problematically, ones that can guarantee tight and safe worst-case execution times. Given the complexity of existing architectures like GPUs, it is unlikely that sufficiently accurate models and algorithms for timing analysis will emerge in the foreseeable future. This motivates our work on Sim-D, a clean-slate approach to designing a real-time data-parallel architecture. Sim-D enforces a predictable execution model by isolating compute- and access resources in hardware. The DRAM controller uninterruptedly transfers tiles of data, requested by entire work-groups. This permits work-groups to be executed as a sequence of deterministic access- and compute phases, scheduling phases from up to two work-groups in parallel. Evaluation using a cycle-accurate timing model shows that Sim-D can achieve performance on par with an embedded-grade NVIDIA TK1 GPU under two conditions: applications refrain from using indirect DRAM transfers into large buffers, and Sim-D's scratchpads provide sufficient bandwidth. Sim-D's design facilitates derivation of safe WCET bounds that are tight within 12.7 percent on average, at an additional average performance penalty of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 9.2 percent caused by scheduling restrictions on phases.

Spitz

Databases in the past have helped businesses maintain and extract insights from their data. Today, it is common for a business to involve multiple independent, distrustful parties. This trend towards decentralization introduces a new and important requirement to databases: the integrity of the data, the history, and the execution must be protected. In other words, there is a need for a new class of database systems whose integrity can be verified (or verifiable databases). In this paper, we identify the requirements and the design challenges of verifiable databases. We observe that the main challenges come from the need to balance data immutability, tamper evidence, and performance. We first consider approaches that extend existing OLTP and OLAP systems with support for verification. We next examine a clean-slate approach, by describing a new system, Spitz, specifically designed for efficiently supporting immutable and tamper-evident transaction management. We conduct a preliminary performance study of both approaches against a baseline system, and provide insights on their performance.

The Quest for Information-Centric Networking

The articles in this special section focus on the topic of information centric networking (ICN), an approach that shifts the Internet infrastructure from a host-centric paradigm, based on perpetual connectivity and the end-to-end principle, to a new paradigm where named data becomes independent from location, application, storage, and means of transportation, enabling in-network storage and replication. The expected benefits include improved effi ciency, better scalability with respect to information/bandwidth demand, and better robustness in challenging communication scenarios. As the most promising clean-slate approach for future Internet, ICN has attracted much attention in the past few years, and created a trajectory that is to replace the current IP-based Internet. There have been many prototypes of ICN, but more research is still ongoing, which includes naming, forwarding/routing, and caching policy, deployment strategy, security policy, and so on.

NDN Construction for Big Science: Lessons Learned from Establishing a Testbed

NDN is one instance of ICN, which is a cleanslate approach that promises to reduce inefficiencies in the current Internet. NDN provides intelligent data retrieval using the principles of name-based symmetrical forwarding of Interest/ Data packets and in-network caching. The continually increasing demand for the rapid dissemination of large-scale scientific data is driving the use of NDN in big science experiments. In this article, we establish the first intercontinental NDN testbed to offer complete insight into NDN construction for big science. In the testbed, an NDN-based application that targets climate science as an example big-science application is designed and implemented with differentiated features compared to previous works on NDNbased application design for big science. We first attempt to systematically address detailed analysis of why or how NDN benefits fit in big science and issues that must be resolved to improve each advantage, mostly based on lessons learned from establishing the NDN testbed for climate science. We extensively justify the needs of using NDN for large-scale scientific data in the intercontinental network, through experimental performance comparisons between classical deliveries and NDNbased climate data delivery, and detailed analysis of why or how NDN benefits fit in big science.

A Security Monitoring Plane for Named Data Networking Deployment

NDN is the most mature proposal of the ICN paradigm, a clean-slate approach for the Future Internet. Although NDN was designed to natively tackle security issues inherent to IP networks, it also introduces new security threats that may prevent its practical deployment by telco operators. Therefore, designing and implementing a dedicated security monitoring plane is essential to enable such future deployment. In this article, we present a set of contributions in this area. It first consists of featuring significant NDN attacks in a real operating context to evaluate their actual impact. Then, by analyzing the NFD data plane pipelines, we present a monitoring plane design that captures the state of NDN nodes by instrumenting 18 metrics with dedicated probes. We then correlate these metrics with a Bayesian network, which allows the detection of potential abnormal behaviors. To validate our approach, we demonstrate the efficiency of our monitoring plane in the detection of content poisoning attacks and interest flooding attacks in a testbed carrying real traffic.

Providing Information Centricity in Today’s Internet via Software-Defined Networking and In-Network Processing

AbstractThe Internet is a successful network that connects people all over the world. However, it has some fundamental architectural problems which require application developers and service providers to spend a tremendous effort in combating these. Examples for these efforts are content delivery networks or mobile TCP. Thus, it can be said that the Internet is currently not fulfilling the requirements on the global network anymore. The Internet of the future, or its replacement, must solve these problems.There are multiple clean-slate approaches for information-centric networking. However, they are inherently incompatible to the Internet or applications building on it.This work presents a novel resource transport protocol that is optimized for detection by software-defined networks and may be re-routed to in-network processors. Furthermore, it is shown how this protocol can be used to support concepts of ICN even in today’s Internet. Moreover, the resource format that is used in this work is independent from the underlying network, resulting in possible reuse in other networks as well. Applications and protocols building on this resource format can thus easily be re-used in clean-slate networks like NDN.

The road towards future Internet

Given the emerging problems of today’s Internet, many new Internet architectures have been proposed by the net- working community. In general, the new approaches can be categorized into two types: evolutionary approaches and clean-slate approaches. The representative evolutionary solution is IPv6, while representative clean-slate approaches are NDN (Named Data Networking), MobilityFirst, NEBULA, XIA (Expressive Internet Architecture), and SDN (Software-Defined Networking). A comprehensive survey of these approaches is presented. Additionally, a novel network architecture that we recently proposed: ADN (Address-Driven Networking) is described, which intends to address the challenges faced by today’s Internet via the flexible and innovative utilization of IP addresses.

A System-Theoretic Clean Slate Approach to Provably Secure Ad-Hoc Wireless Networking

Traditionally, wireless network protocols have been designed for performance. Subsequently, as attacks have been identified, patches have been developed. This has resulted in an “arms race” development process of discovering vulnerabilities and then patching them. The fundamental difficulty with this approach is that other vulnerabilities may still exist. No provable security or performance guarantees can ever be provided. We develop a system-theoretic approach to security that provides a complete protocol suite with provable guarantees, as well as proof of min-max optimality with respect to any given utility function of source-destination rates. Our approach is based on a model capturing the essential features of an ad-hoc wireless network that has been infiltrated with hostile nodes. We consider any collection of nodes, some good and some bad, possessing specified capabilities vis-a-vis cryptography, wireless communication, and clocks. The good nodes do not know the bad nodes. The bad nodes can collaborate perfectly, and are capable of any disruptive acts ranging from simply jamming to noncooperation with the protocols in any manner they please. The protocol suite caters to the complete life cycle, all the way from the birth of nodes, through all phases of ad-hoc network formation, leading to an optimized network carrying data reliably. It provably achieves the min-max of the utility function, where the max is over all protocol suites published and followed by the good nodes, while the min is over all Byzantine behaviors of the bad nodes. Under the protocol suite, the bad nodes do not benefit from any actions other than jamming or cooperating. This approach supersedes much of the previous work that deals with several types of attacks including wormhole, rushing, partial deafness, routing loops, routing black holes, routing gray holes, and network partition attacks.

Energy-efficient quality of service aware forwarding scheme for Content-Centric Networking

Content-Centric Networking (CCN), which changes from host-centric communication model to content-centric communication model, has recently attracted a lot of attention from researchers. As recently emerged a clean slate approach of the future Internet, CCN needs to be further supplemented yet. Since power consumption by Internet and user demand for Quality of Service have been increasing year by year, one of the major challenges in CCN is how to support an energy-efficient intelligent forwarding engine. To address this challenge, this paper proposed a Greening Domain and Ant Colony based Forwarding (GDACF) scheme which is a joint caching and forwarding strategy. In our proposals, we firstly use popularity inspired caching and adaptive rate methods to reduce power consumption of CCN; Then we design an ant colony based packets forwarding scheme to support Quality of Service for CCN. The evaluation results show that our proposals decrease data retrieve time from 3.29% to 16.16% and save energy from 9.66% to 15.08% compared with original CCN forwarding strategy.

End-to-End Networks Vs Named Data Network: A Critical Evaluation

Named data networking or information centric networking is the newest networking paradigm that gives foremost place to the contents in identification and dissemination. On the other hand, the end to end networking paradigm on which the Internet is currently built on places heavy emphasis on devices that make the architecture. The current Internet suffers from many shortcomings due to the misplaced emphasis. In order to overcome some of these deficiencies, researchers and developers have come up with patches and work around that have made the Internet more complex than it ought to be. Named data networking is a clean slate approach in building a network architecture overcoming all the current deficiencies and make it future safe. Several researchers have carried out comparative studies between named data networking and end to end networking. But these studies concentrate only on the features and capabilities of the networking paradigms. This is the first attempt at quantifying the performance the networking architectures experimentally. The authors in this paper present the results of the comparative study carried out experimentally in a simulated environment based on the final throughput. The results have been presented in a graphical form for easy visualization of results.

ZNA: A Six-Layer Network Architecture for New Generation Networks —— Focusing on the Session Layer, the Network Layer, and Cross-Layer Cooperation ——

Using “clean-slate approach” to redesign the Internet has attracted considerable attention. ZNA (Z Network Architecture) is one of clean-slate network architectures based on the layered model. The major features of ZNA are as follows: (1) introducing the session layer to provide the applications with sophisticated communication services, (2) employing inter-node cross-layer cooperation to adapt to the dynamically changing network conditions, (3) splitting the node identifier and the node locator for mobility, multi-homing, and heterogeneity of network layer protocols, (4) splitting the data plane and the control plane for high manageability, and (5) introducing a recursive layered model to support network virtualization. This paper focuses on the first three topics as well as the basic design of ZNA.

Challenges and Research Directions for the Future Internetworking

We review the main challenges and survey promising techniques for network interconnection in the Internet of the future. To this end, we first discuss the shortcomings of the Internet's current model. Among them, many are consequence of unforeseen demands on the original Internet design such as: mobility, multihoming, multipath, and network scalability. These challenges have attracted significant research efforts in the latest years because of both their relevance and complexity. In this survey, for the sake of completeness, we cover several new protocols for network interconnection spanning both incremental deployments (evolutionary approach) and radical proposals to redesign the Internet from scratch (clean-slate approach). We focus on specific proposals for future internetworking such as: Loc/ID split, flat routing, network mobility, multipath and content-based routing, path programmability, and Internet scalability. Although there is no consensus on the future internetworking approach, requirements such as security, scalability, and incremental deployment are often considered.

Spatial Modulation for Generalized MIMO: Challenges, Opportunities, and Implementation

A key challenge of future mobile communication research is to strike an attractive compromise between wireless network's area spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. This necessitates a clean-slate approach to wireless system design, embracing the rich body of existing knowledge, especially on multiple-input-multiple-ouput (MIMO) technologies. This motivates the proposal of an emerging wireless communications concept conceived for single-radio-frequency (RF) large-scale MIMO communications, which is termed as SM. The concept of SM has established itself as a beneficial transmission paradigm, subsuming numerous members of the MIMO system family. The research of SM has reached sufficient maturity to motivate its comparison to state-of-the-art MIMO communications, as well as to inspire its application to other emerging wireless systems such as relay-aided, cooperative, small-cell, optical wireless, and power-efficient communications. Furthermore, it has received sufficient research attention to be implemented in testbeds, and it holds the promise of stimulating further vigorous interdisciplinary research in the years to come. This tutorial paper is intended to offer a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey on SM-MIMO research, to provide a critical appraisal of its potential advantages, and to promote the discussion of its beneficial application areas and their research challenges leading to the analysis of the technological issues associated with the implementation of SM-MIMO. The paper is concluded with the description of the world's first experimental activities in this vibrant research field.

Local innovation: The key to globalisation

The round table discussion draws the panellists to weigh in on how multinational enterprises from developed countries are innovating in and for emerging markets, the challenges faced, and lessons learnt. The key takeaways are that MNEs are increasingly innovating for the Indian market, alongside their contribution to global products. They are doing so by developing close relationships with field facing organisations, co-creating with customers, empowering engineers, and taking a clean slate approach to product development. This approach has given them dividends not only in the local market but also in the global market.

Multiflow: Multicast clean-slate with anticipated route calculation on OpenFlow programmable networks

Increasingly popular, Internet applications for multimedia broadcasting require multipoint communication, in order to reduce network traffic rates. However, the widespread adoption of traditional multicast protocols is still held back by the current Internet structure, where the responsibility for management of multicast groups is distributed among network devices. By using distributed algorithms, such protocols generate delays in processing control groups events. In this paper we propose a clean-slate approach for multimedia multicasting, where the end to end calculation of the best route is performed to decrease delays in group configuration. The prototype developed implements this approach using OpenFlow technology. Results obtained through experimentation show a performance gain in relation to traditional IP multicasting. Key words: Multicast, SDN, OpenFlow.