Improving Protocol Standards for a more Trustworthy Internet

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This project will make the Internet's infrastructure and applications morereliable and secure, more trustworthy and less vulnerable to cyber attack,by improving the engineering processes by which the network is designed.The Internet comprises a large number of laptops, smartphones, and otheredge devices, connecting to servers located in data centres around theworld via numerous interconnecting links and switching devices. To makethis work, all the devices must agree on how they should communicate. Thatis, they must speak a common language, known as a "protocol" that describesthe format of the information that is sent and the operations to beperformed. There are many such protocols, describing the different types of communication. For example, the HTTP protocol describes how browsersfetch pages from websites.To ensure interoperability between devices from different manufacturers,these protocols are described in a series of standards documents, publishedby organisations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Thesestandards are developed incrementally by teams of engineers working overseveral months, or perhaps years, to produce a written specification thatdescribes how the protocol should work. Despite the best efforts of thosedeveloping the standards, however, the results are often found to containinconsistencies and ambiguities. These can lead to devices from differentmanufacturers failing to work together, due to differing interpretations ofthe standard, and in the worst cases can lead to vulnerabilities that opendevices up to cyber attack.Much of the reason for these inconsistencies and ambiguities is that theprotocol standards are written in English, and hence there's no automatedway of checking them for correctness. Researchers have proposed ways ofdescribing protocols using methods (known as "formal languages") that aremore like computer programming languages, and that would allow automatedconsistency checks to be made, but these have not been widely adopted bythe standards community. This project will study the social, cultural, and educational barriers toadoption of these new techniques, to understand why standards continue tobe written in English. We will explore the perceived limitations of thealternatives, to understand why they've been adopted in certain niches, and for certain purposes, but are not used more broadly in standardsdevelopment.We'll then formulate a model for the adoption of formal languages and theirsupporting tools in the protocol standards community, and use it identifyareas that are ready to increase use of such techniques in their standards.Finally, we'll use the knowledge gained to propose formal languages, thatare designed to fit the way the standards developers work, and begin theprocess of introducing these into the standards process, to improveprotocol specifications and make them less vulnerable to attack.The work will be conduced in the IETF, since it's the key internationaltechnical standards body developing Internet protocol standards. The aim isto improve the quality and trustworthiness of the standards that the IETFdevelops, and increase security, robustness, and interoperability of theInternet. The novel engineering research idea we will explore is thatformal languages need to be adapted to the community of interest. It is notenough that they help solve the technical problem of how to specify aprotocol: they must do so in a way that fits the expertise and culture ofthose who need to use them. Research into structured approaches and formallanguages for protocol design has not yet considered the nature of thestandards process, and hence has not seen wide uptake. We start with a deepawareness of the standards process, consider social and technical barriersto uptake, and propose new techniques to improve the way standards aredeveloped.