Colin Perkins : Research : Improving Protocol Standards

Research : Improving Protocol Standards

In addition to designing network protocols to address specific problems around network transport protocols and compact routing, I'm pleased to receive funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to study the process of developing protocol standards. The aim of this work is to help make the Internet's infrastructure and applications more robust by improving the engineering processes used to build standard protocols.

Getting Empirical About Standards

24 October 2024 / protocol-standards

I attended the Fourth Annual Empirical Research Conference on Standardisation, held in Chicago on 24-25 October 2024 and organised by the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, to present some results from our Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards project.

Proposing an IRTF Usable Formal Methods Research Group

30 November 2022 / protocol-standards

How should we describe and specify protocols? And how can we ensure that network protocol specifications are consistent and correct, and that implementations match the specification?

The IETF community has long used natural language to describe and specify protocols, with occasional use of formal languages and some limited amount of formal verification. In many ways this is clearly a successful approach. After all, the Internet exists as an interoperable, global, multi-vendor, network in large part due to the protocol standards the IETF develops. It is clearly possible to build interoperable implementations from IETF standards.

But is this the right approach to developing protocol specifications? The way the IETF describes protocols has changed little over the years. It may be time to consider whether new techniques have been developed that might change how protocols are specified, and possibly improve the process.

With help from Chris Wood, I organised a side meeting at IETF 115 to discuss whether there could be benefits to more systematic use of formal methods in the IETF, what are the factors limiting the adoption of such techniques, and whether it would make sense to create an IRTF research group to explore such topics.

Welcome to Ivan Nikitin - new PhD student

7 October 2022 / protocol-standards

Welcome to Ivan Nikitin who started as a PhD student this week. Ivan will be jointly advised by me and Ornela Dardha, and will be looking at how to make session types a practical design tool for protocol standards.

The Web We Weave: Untangling the Social Graph of the IETF

27 June 2022 / protocol-standards

To what extent is the technical development of the Internet driven by a small clique of standards developers? What influence do those developers have? And what control do large technology companies have on the development of the technical standards that define the operation of the Internet?

We attempted to answer these questions in a paper that Prashant Khare recently presented at the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM).

In that paper, we studied more than 2 million email messages, sent by almost 45 thousand participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), over a twenty year period. The IETF is one of the leading technical standards development organisations relating to the Internet, and these discussions record the development of key Internet standards – including the latest versions of the web protocols, security standards, and widely used telephony, video conferencing, and video streaming platforms – to understand the social interactions and dynamics of the standards-setting process.

Exploring IETF Email Interactions

5 November 2021 / protocol-standards

The development of IETF standards takes place by a mix of plenary and interim meetings, and continuous, ongoing, discussion on mailing lists. We analysed the public IETF mailing list archives to understand the role email plays in the development of Internet standards, collecting 2.4 million emails, sent by 75 thousand participants to 1153 mailing lists during the period 1995-2000.

Who writes Internet standards documents?

4 November 2021 / protocol-standards

The IETF, as a standards development organisation for the Internet, grew out of the original US government-funded project that developed some of the early internetworking protocols. The organisation has long recognised that this history has biased its participants towards "well-funded, American, white, male technicians, demonstrating a distinctive and challenging group dynamic, both in management and in personal interactions", and it is well understood in the IETF that this lack of diversity is problematic for an organisation that tries to develop the Internet for all its end users. The community has made some efforts to encourage attendance by a broader range of people. Has it succeeded in these attempts to diversify?

Internet standards are becoming more complex

3 November 2021 / protocol-standards

As the Internet develops, it's natural to ask whether it's getting easier or harder to develop new standards, and whether the complexity of those standards is changing over time. In the following, we show that Internet standards documents have become more densely interconnected over the years, and are taking longer to publish. The IETF is becoming slower over time, because new standards are harder to develop when they must account for, and retain backwards compatibility with, increasing amounts of prior work.

Trends in Internet Standards Publication

2 November 2021 / protocol-standards

The technical details that describe the operation of the Internet are defined in the RFC series of documents. This series began publication in 1969, as a set of requests for comment on the initial design ideas for the system that became the Internet. Over time, it developed into the main series of technical specifications and standards that describe how the Internet works.

As the Internet had grown from a research project to critical international infrastructure, it’s natural to ask how the underpinning standards development process has changed. In particular, one might ask how the number of Internet standards being published has changed over time, and how this relates to the development of the network.

Characterising the IETF Through the Lens of RFC Deployment

2 November 2021 / protocol-standards

Stephen McQuistin will present our paper on Characterising the IETF Through the Lens of RFC Deployment at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference today.

This paper examines the shifts and trends within the Internet standards development process, to show how the time needed to develop a technical standard for the Internet has increased over the years, and how those standards have become more complex as the network has evolved. Then, building on these observations, it develops statistical models to understand the factors that lead to successful uptake and deployment of protocols, deriving insights to improve the standardisation process.

Machine-readable protocol specifications at the IETF 112 hackathon

1 November 2021 / protocol-standards

The IETF 112 hackathon starts today, and Stephen McQuistin and I will be participating to promote our work on adding machine-readable packet format descriptions to IETF standards documents.

Talk on 50 Years of Standardisation in the Internet

10 December 2020 / protocol-standards

As part of our project on Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards, Ignacio Castro gave an invited talk to the IESG, on the subject 50 Years of Standardisation in the Internet.

Talks on Parsing Protocol Standards

7 November 2020 / protocol-standards

Two members of my research group recently gave talks about our work on parsing protocol standards. Stephen McQuistin spoke in the UK Next Generation Networks seminar series, giving an update on the work presented in our ANRW'20 paper, outlining the system architecture and showing how our system can be used to describe the format of real-world protocols such as TCP. Vivian Band spoke about Rust for Safer Protocol Development as part of RustFest Global 2020, describing our approach to parsing protocols with a focus on the back-end code generation, and our use of Rust with the nom parser combinator framework to generate safe parsing code.

Parsing Protocol Standards to Parse Standard Protocols

4 August 2020 / protocol-standards

Stephen McQuistin presented our paper on Parsing Protocol Standards to Parse Standard Protocols at the ACM/IRTF Applied Networking Research Workshop 2020 last week. In this paper we consider the problem of how to parse Internet protocols standards documents to generate a typed representation of protocol data units, and from that to generate parsing and serialisation code to ease implementation of the protocol. The goal is to make it easier to implement, test, and validate network protocols, and to help improve security by removing the need to write protocol parsing code by hand.

Panel on the Future of Internet Transport at IFIP Networking 2020

22 June 2020 / protocol-standards

I was pleased to join a panel discussion at the IFIP Networking 2020 Workshop on the Future of Internet Transport today, along with Jana Iyengar and Alessandro Ghedini, and moderated by Gorry Fairhurst. The slides I used to frame my position are available, and if you're registered for the conference, a recording of the discussion is also available.

Python library to access IETF Datatracker (ietfdata-v0.2.0)

18 May 2020 / protocol-standards

We released an update to our Python library for access to the IETF Datatracker and RFC Index (GitHub, PyPI). The library is supporting infrastructure for our research, that we use to find and retrieve new drafts to test our protocol parsing and generation tools, and to support bibliometric analysis of IETF standards documents.

Welcome to Dejice Jacob - new research assistant

3 March 2020 / protocol-standards

Welcome to Dejice Jacob, who's joined our project on Improving Protocol Standards. He will be working on improving our tooling to extract packet descriptions from IETF standards documents, and on integration with the IETF datatracker.

Improving protocol standards at IETF 106

17 November 2019 / protocol-standards

As part of our work on improving protocol standards, Stephen McQuistin and I are at the IETF 106 meeting in Singapore this week. We have an update to our draft on Describing Protocol Data Units with Augmented Packet Header Diagrams, and will be joining the hackathon to work on tools for extracting structured information from protocol specifications.

Postdoc position available - Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards

18 October 2019 / protocol-standards

I'm seeking a postdoctoral research associate to work on the EPSRC-funded project "Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards", working with Matthew Purver, Patrick Healy, Gareth Tyson, and Ignacio Castro at Queen Mary, University of London. The project involves working with the IETF and research community, to understand and improve the distributed decision making process by which Internet protocol standards are developed.

EPSRC Engineering for a Prosperous Nation Workshop

1 October 2019 / protocol-standards

I attended the mid-term review workshop for projects funded under the EPSRC Engineering for a Prosperous Nation call, held at the Law Society in London earlier today.

Improving protocol standards at IETF 105

20 July 2019 / protocol-standards

The initial goal of our work on improving protocol standards is to make it easier to automatically generate packet parsers from IETF RFCs. We've submitted an internet draft describing a machine-readable way to specify packet formats, while being only a minimal change compared to existing authoring methods. Stephen McQuistin and I will be at the IETF meeting in Montreal this week (20-27 July 2019) to discuss this with the IETF community.

Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards

6 July 2019 / protocol-standards

I'm pleased to announce that EPSRC has agreed to support our new project on "Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards" (EP/S036075/1). This is joint work with Matthew Purver, Patrick Healy, Gareth Tyson, and Ignacio Castro at Queen Mary, University of London, and will run for three years starting January 2020.

Improving protocol standards at the 31st Multi-Service Networks Workshop

5 July 2019 / protocol-standards

Stephen McQuistin gave a talk about our work to improve protocol standards at the 31st Multi-Service Networks Workshop, held on 5 July 2019 at The Cosener's House in Abingdon.

Talk about Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards

4 July 2019 / protocol-standards

Gareth Tyson and Ignacio Castro gave a talk about our new project on Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards at the 31st Multi-Service Networks Workshop, held in July 2019 at The Cosener's House in Abingdon.

Welcome to Vivian Band - summer internship on protocol parsing

1 July 2019 / protocol-standards

Welcome to Vivian Band, who's joined our project on Improving Protocol Standards for a ten week paid summer internship. Vivian will be working on implementing the back-end code generator that parses protocol data units in our system, initially aiming to generate protocol parsers in the Rust programming language.

Improving protocol standards at IETF 103

4 November 2018 / protocol-standards

I'm at IETF 103 in Bangkok this week, along with Stephen McQuistin, where we'll be discussing how to bring more structured and machine readable features to IETF specifications, exploring the attitudes of participants to such formalisms, and trying to understand the barriers to adoption. If you're at the IETF meeting, and interested in these topics, please come and talk to me or to Stephen.

Parsing Protocol Standards, Parsing Standard Protocols

30 October 2018 / protocol-standards

I gave a talk at Loughborough University last week, entitled “Parsing Protocol Standards, Parsing Standard Protocols”, and will repeat it as a Systems Section seminar in Glasgow later today. The talk introduces some of the work we're doing in my EPSRC project on Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet.

Postdoc position available - Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet

28 February 2018 / protocol-standards

I'm seeking a postdoctoral research associate to work on the EPSRC-funded project "Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet". The position involves working with the IETF and research community, to develop semi-formal tools and methods for specifying protocol standards, along with tools to support their use in the IETF community. The goal is to improve the quality of Internet protocol standards.

Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet

27 February 2018 / protocol-standards

I'm pleased that the EPSRC has agreed to support our work on "Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet". This is a two year project, funded under the Engineering for a Prosperous Nation call, that aims to make the Internet more robust by improving the way in which the underlying protocol standards are developed. Stephen McQuistin will join the project as a Research Assistant, and I expect to advertise for a further RA position shortly.

This work is supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grants EP/R04144X/1 and EP/S036075/1.