Abstract

The Internet was initially designed to be a decentralized system, but in recent decades has transitioned towards an increasingly centralized ecosystem where majority of the Internet traffic is brokered through large content-delivery hyper-giants. In the first half of my talk, I will present a long-term perspective on the growth and ubiquity of hyper-giants, and their push towards providing new services traditionally delivered by Internet service providers (ISPs). Consequently, more content is getting centralised, and is leading to increased security and privacy concerns. In the second half of my talk, I will speak about how we can combat this centralisation trend, and instead pivot towards digital sovereignty. I will present how new foundations can be built and deployed using upcoming secure and privacy enhancing protocols to give back users control of their data when using traditional network services, and eventually the Web.

Bio: Vaibhav Bajpai is an independent research group leader at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Hannover. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich. He received his PhD (2016) and Masters (2012) degrees from Jacobs University Bremen. He is the recipient of the best of CCR award (2019), ACM SIGCOMM best paper award (2018), and IEEE CNOM best dissertation award (2017). He is also the recipient of the Preis für die beste Lehre (2020) awarded by the Department of Computer Science at TUM . His current research focuses on improving Internet operations (e.g., performance, security, and privacy) using data-intensive methods and by building real-world systems and models.