Team for Research in
Ubiquitous Secure Technology

Citation
Alan Shieh, Andrew C. Myers, Emin Gun Sirer. "Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved Scalability, Resilience and Flexibility". Proceedings of Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI), Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI), May, 2005.

Abstract
Traditional operating system interfaces and network protocol implementations force system state to be kept on both sides of a connection. Such state ties the connection to an endpoint, impedes transparent failover, permits denial-of-service attacks, and limits scalability. This paper introduces a novel TCP-like transport protocol and a new interface to replace sockets that together enable all state to be kept on one endpoint, allowing the other endpoint, typically the server, to operate without any per-connection state. Called Trickles, this approach enables servers to scale well with increasing numbers of clients, consume fewer resources, and better resist denial-of-service attacks. Measurements on a full implementation in Linux indicate that Trickles achieves performance comparable to TCP/IP, interacts well with other flows, and scales well. Trickles also enables qualitatively different kinds of networked services. Services can be geographically replicated and contacted through an anycast primitive for improved availability and performance. Widely-deployed practices that currently have client-observable side effects, such as periodic server reboots, connection redirection, and failover, can be made transparent, and perform well, under Trickles. The protocol is secure against tampering and replay attacks, and the client interface is backwards-compatible, requiring no changes to sockets-based client applications.

Electronic downloads

• trickles-nsdi05.pdf · application/pdf · 240 kbytes

• HTML

  Alan Shieh, Andrew C. Myers, Emin Gun Sirer. <a
  href="http://www.truststc.org/pubs/182.html"
  >Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved
  Scalability, Resilience and Flexibility</a>,
  Proceedings of Networked System Design and Implementation
  (NSDI), Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI),
  May, 2005.

• Plain text

  Alan Shieh, Andrew C. Myers, Emin Gun Sirer. "Trickles:
  A Stateless Network Stack for Improved Scalability,
  Resilience and Flexibility". Proceedings of Networked
  System Design and Implementation (NSDI), Networked System
  Design and Implementation (NSDI), May, 2005.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{ShiehMyersSirer05_TricklesStatelessNetworkStackForImprovedScalability,
      author = {Alan Shieh and Andrew C. Myers and Emin Gun Sirer},
      title = {Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved
                Scalability, Resilience and Flexibility},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of Networked System Design and
                Implementation (NSDI)},
      organization = {Networked System Design and Implementation (NSDI)},
      month = {May},
      year = {2005},
      abstract = {Traditional operating system interfaces and
                network protocol implementations force system
                state to be kept on both sides of a connection.
                Such state ties the connection to an endpoint,
                impedes transparent failover, permits
                denial-of-service attacks, and limits scalability.
                This paper introduces a novel TCP-like transport
                protocol and a new interface to replace sockets
                that together enable all state to be kept on one
                endpoint, allowing the other endpoint, typically
                the server, to operate without any per-connection
                state. Called Trickles, this approach enables
                servers to scale well with increasing numbers of
                clients, consume fewer resources, and better
                resist denial-of-service attacks. Measurements on
                a full implementation in Linux indicate that
                Trickles achieves performance comparable to
                TCP/IP, interacts well with other flows, and
                scales well. Trickles also enables qualitatively
                different kinds of networked services. Services
                can be geographically replicated and contacted
                through an anycast primitive for improved
                availability and performance. Widely-deployed
                practices that currently have client-observable
                side effects, such as periodic server reboots,
                connection redirection, and failover, can be made
                transparent, and perform well, under Trickles. The
                protocol is secure against tampering and replay
                attacks, and the client interface is
                backwards-compatible, requiring no changes to
                sockets-based client applications.},
      URL = {http://www.truststc.org/pubs/182.html}
  }
  

Posted by Kelly Patwell on 13 Feb 2007.
For additional information, see the Publications FAQ or contact webmaster at www truststc org.