The UPIN (User-driven Path verification and control for Inter-domain Networks) project aims to increase the trust of end users in the Internet by effectively providing them with the necessary level of knowledge and control over how their traffic flows through the network. The UPIN project is a starting collaboration between the University of Twente and the University of Amsterdam and it is funded by NWO.
Currently, Internet users cannot verify nor control who processes their data when it travels across the network, for instance in terms of the service providers and network nodes that their data passes through and what jurisdictions apply. This lack of transparency and control is a risk for people’s privacy (e.g., a malicious network compromising their data) and their safety (e.g., an untrusted network disrupting a remote surgery).
It also increases costs, because organizations opt for setting up a “bypass network” to meet the transparency and control requirements of their applications rather than using a shared inter-network. Such problems are an increasing concern for critical service providers, such as healthcare or power supplying providers.
The goal of UPIN is to investigate methods for giving a certain degree of control over data routing to the user. We aim at achieving this through Path Control and Path Verification in both Single domain and Inter-domain networks. Other known efforts for solving the lack of control on the Internet exist, such as RINA and SCION. These two specific systems tackle the root of the problem, which is the current internet architecture. UPIN in the other hand, aims at a solution that can better blend into the current internet infrastructure, relying highly on Software-defined Networks (SDN).