CS faculty building a better Internet

Computer science assistant professor Brighten Godfrey was among a select group of academic researchers and Internet visionaries chosen to participate in Verisign's "Building a Better Internet Symposium."

The forum, held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., explored how the Internet's core infrastructure can evolve to support the challenges of billions of new users, increasing complexity, and internationalization. Godfrey's project was one of four chosen internationally to receive a $75,000 infrastructure grant that Verisign awarded as part of its 25 Years of .Com commemorations.

The University of Illinois project, a collaboration with PhD students Wenxuan Zhou and Qingxi Li and Professors Matthew Caesar and Brighten Godfrey, developed methods to accelerate the Web and other interactive networked applications, via secure, deployable extensions to the domain name system (DNS) and transport control protocol (TCP). The team created the Accelerated Secure Association Protocol, or ASAP, which establishes a connection between client and server quickly and securely. The protocol enables the server to verify the key security property that the client's source address is not forged, yet avoids the delay of TCP's "handshake" method of verification.

"What I'm really excited about is how do we make the other side of the world feel like it's right at our fingertips," said Godfrey. "The exciting thing is that this work can have broad impact.  If ASAP is widely deployed, it would make every connection on the web faster."

The Verisign grant program was judged by a distinguished panel including Rod Beckstrom, President and CEO of ICANN; Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google; Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Secretary; Paul Mockapetris, computer scientist and inventor of the Domain Name System; and Danny McPherson, Chief Security Officer at Verisign.

Godfrey describes his work on the project in a video produced by Verisign, and a video featuring Vint Cerf introduces the grant program.
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Contact: Brighten Godfrey, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4862.

Writer: Jennifer LaMontagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.