Call for Papers: Workshop on Decentralized Internet Infrastructure (DIN) 2019

Background

The internet was designed as a distributed, decentralized system. For example, intra- and inter-domain routing, DNS, and so on were designed to operate in a distributed manner. However, over time the dominant deployment model for applications and some infrastructure services evolved to become more centralized and hierarchical. Some of the increase in centralization is due to business models that rely on centralized accounting and administration.

However, we are simultaneously seeing the evolution of use cases (e.g., certain IoT deployments) that have difficulties scaling up and/or establishing trust in centralized deployment scenarios, along with the evolution of decentralized technologies which leverage new cryptographic infrastructures, such as DNSSEC, or which use novel, cryptographically-based distributed consensus mechanisms, such as a number of different ledger technologies.

While there is currently intensive research and development taking place around decentralized applications, the problem of decentralized infrastructure is receiving relatively less attention, despite the research challenges in this space. Some of these challenges include:

• Scalability – what are the problems that prevent decentralized infrastructure services from achieving global scale?
• Trust management in decentralized communication settings
• Privacy and targeted, verifiable disclosure
• Applicability of distributed ledger and related technologies to different use cases and environments
• Consensus algorithms for specific scenarios with a focus on Internet infrastructure services
• Distributed Trust and Delegated Computing
• Economic drivers and roadblocks for decentralizing network infrastructure

Although the term “decentralized” tends to suggest distributed ledger-based approaches, our interest in decentralized infrastructure is not limited to the use of ledgers.

This workshop will address open research issues in decentralizing Internet infrastructure services such as trust management, name resolution, resource ownership management, and resource discovery.

Location and Important Dates

Location: Catamaran Resort Hotel & Spa in San Diego, California, USA

Submission Instructions

Submissions should be non-anonymous, and consist of a main body and, optionally, well-marked appendices. For papers that have already been published, submission should include a cover letter (at most 2 pages) commenting on what the workshop presentation would contain, appended with the published paper. For papers not already formally published, the main body should be about 12 pages in length with reasonable margins and fonts. Appendices are optional and unlimited in length; however, Workshop Technical Program Committee members may base their decisions solely on the contents of the main bodies of submissions.

We also invite short papers of up to 6 pages covering work in progress, short communications, as well as novel or provocative ideas. Short papers will be selected based on their potential to spark interesting discussions during the workshop. They should be about 6 pages in length. We expect to be flexible on length and format given relevant submissions.

Papers should be submitted at https://din19.hotcrp.com

Workshop Organizers and TPC Co-chairs

Melinda Shore, Fastly
Dirk Kutscher, Huawei

Technical Program Committee

Shehar Bano, University College London
Carsten Bormann, Universität Bremen
Christian Huitema, Private Octopus
Paulo Mendes, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias
Thomas Hardjono, MIT Trust::Data Consortium
Liubingyang, Huawei
Marcelo Bagnulo, UC3M
Jon Crowcroft, University of Cambridge
Jörg Ott, TU Munich
Keshav Srinivasan, University of Waterloo
Jean-Luc Watson, University of California, Berkeley
Christian Esteve Rothenberg, University of Campinas
Lixia Zhang, UCLA
Dave Oran, Network Systems Research