Building Data-Intensive Foundations for a Modern Internet
The Internet is one of the most complex systems the human race has engineered. Yet, this increasing complexity has made it incredibly challenging to dissect, model, and predict its behavior reliably. It's like trying to fine-tune a machine whose inner workings become increasingly obscure even to its creators.
Professor Bajpai’s presentation will delve into the fascinating realm of privacy within the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS, a cornerstone of Internet infrastructure, is responsible for translating human-readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses
However, the increasing centralization of DNS traffic by major content-delivery giants like Google, coupled with the fact that most DNS communication still occurs over unencrypted channels (UDP/TCP), has sparked significant security and privacy concerns. In this deep dive, Prof. Bajpai will share recent findings on DNS resiliency and efficiency, the current status of privacy-enabling protocols within DNS, and the performance trade-offs associated with encrypting DNS communication. Finally, he will outline a forward-looking protocol design that harmonizes performance with privacy, achieving the best of both worlds: enhanced privacy for DNS and secure web communication.
Prof. Dr. Vaibhav Bajpai is a professor and head of the Data-Intensive Internet Computing Research Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute and the University of Potsdam. He previously led an independent research group at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Hannover.
Prior to this, he was a senior researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich. He received his PhD (2016) and Masters (2012) degrees from Jacobs University Bremen. His current research focuses on improving Internet operations using data-intensive methods and by building real-world systems and models.