Network use has evolved to be dominated by content distribution and retrieval, while networking technology still speaks only of connections between hosts. Accessing content and services requires mapping from the what that users care about to the network's where. We present Content-Centric Networking (CCN) which treats content as a primitive - decoupling location from identity, security and access, and retrieving content by name. Using new approaches to routing named content, derived heavily from IP, we can simultaneously achieve scalability, security and performance. We implemented our architecture's basic features and demonstrate resilience and performance with secure file downloads and VoIP calls.

Existing technologies for file sharing differ widely in the granularity of control they give users over who can access their data; achieving finer-grained control generally requires more user effort. We want to understand what level of control users need over their data, by examining what sorts of access policies users actually create in practice.

Many real-world applications use credentials such as passwords as means of user authentication. When accessed from untrusted public terminals, such applications are vulnerable to credential sniffing attacks, as shown by recent highly publicized compromises. In this paper, we describe a secure remote terminal application that allows users possessing a trusted device to delegate their credentials for performing a task to a public terminal without being in danger of disclosing any long-term secrets. Instead, the user gives the terminal the capability of performing a task temporarily (as long as the user is in its proximity). Our model is intuitive in the sense that the user exposes to the untrusted terminal only what he sees on the display, and nothing else. We present the design and implementation of such a system. The overhead - in terms of additional network traffic - created by introducing a trusted third party is a moderate 12%.

Consider a CIA agent who wants to authenticate herself to a server but does not want to reveal her CIA credentials unless the server is a genuine CIA outlet. Consider also that the CIA server does not want to reveal its CIA credentials to anyone but CIA agents - not even to other CIA servers. We first show how pairing-based cryptography can be used to implement such secret handshakes. We then propose a formal definition for secure secret handshakes, and prove that our pairing-based schemes are secure under the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our protocols support role-based group membership authentication, traceability, indistinguishability to eavesdroppers, unbounded collusion resistance, and forward repudiability. Our secret-handshake scheme can be implemented as a TLS cipher suite. We report on the performance of our preliminary Java implementation.

Peer-to-peer systems appear promising in terms of their ability to support ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration. However, current peer-to-peer systems suffer from several deficiencies that diminish their ability to support this domain, such as inflexibility in terms of discovery protocols, network usage, and data transports. We have developed the Speakeasy framework, which addresses these issues, and supports these types of applications. We show how Speakeasy addresses the shortcomings of current peer-to-peer systems, and describe a demonstration application, called Casca, that supports ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration by taking advantages of the mechanisms provided by Speakeasy.

Recent results from usability studies of security systems have shown that end-users find them difficult to adopt and use. In this paper we argue that improving the usability of security technology is only one part of the problem, and that what is missed is the need to design usable and useful systems that provide security to end-users in terms of the applications that they use and the tasks they want to achieve. We propose alternate ways of building and integrating security technologies into applications and usability methods for evaluating how successful our prototypes are. We believe that the end results of designing usable and useful (from the end-user perspective) systems will be secure applications which will reflect the needs of users who are increasingly using computers away from the office and in a wider variety of networked configurations.