Two papers accepted at Hotnets’20

The next ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks will include two articles co-authored by researchers from UCLouvain’s IP Networking Lab.

The first paper is entitled xBGP: When you can’t wait for the IETF and vendors. This is a joint work with Thomas Wirtgen, Quentin De Coninck, Randy Bush and Laurent Vanbever. Routing protocols such as BGP evolve very slowly. Network operators often need to wait several years to be able to deploy a new feature or protocol extension. This slows networking innovation. In this paper, we propose to consider routing protocols as software systems that expose an API which can be used by programs developed by network operators. This makes the routing protocols fully programmable. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach by modifying two different BGP daemons (BIRD and FRRouting) so that they can execute exactly the same extension.

The second paper is entitled TCPLS: Closely Integrating TCP and TLS. This is a joint work with Florentin Rochet and Emery Assogba. TCP and TLS were designed as independant protocols. Today, a large fraction of the applications use both TCP and TLS. In this paper, we demonstrate that by integrating these two protocols it is possible to obtain a protocol that is more resilient and more flexible than TCP. We demonstrate the benefits of this integration on a prototype.

These two articles and the associated software prototypes are being revised. They will be released in the coming weeks.