ISE02-4: L2VPN over Chord: Hosting Millions of Small Zeroconf Networks over DHT Nodes

Although there are variety of VPN products and software available today, it is still difficult for normal users to setup their own VPN server and configure their firewall and NAT so that they can allow remote access to their home network. In this paper, we propose a DHT-based L2VPN hosting infrastructure that allows millions of consumer users to easily create their own L2VPN server processes outside their home network, which can then bridge their home network and remote VPN clients. Because each L2VPN server acts like a virtual Ethernet switch, a user can use auto-configuration technologies like Zeroconf, which relies on layer-2 broadcast capability, among his or her networks and hosts bridged by the L2VPN server. This extends applicability of Zeroconf-like technologies from local are to wide area and greatly broaden their usefulness. A user can dynamically form a L2VPN with widely distributed hosts and use it as a secure plug & play networking platform for Zeroconf-enabled applications. We show that the proposed infrastructure can be easily implemented using an existing DHT technology while achieving great scalability and minimizing the operational cost of the infrastructure nodes.