EPSRC grant forms are very heavily constrained on the amount of space you have to work with on the form hence the lack of detail here.

The reason why DoS attacks may not be illegal , is that it is very difficult to define why connecting to a site too many times from a single server is an attack, just look at the number of times your browser connects to slashdot to read a single page. By advertising the site through the routing system you are inviting traffic, which leads to you giving permission to be connected too, there is no way for you to say you shall only connect X times per second too me, which is one of the positive benefits behind the network capabilities systems proposed in the research work. Co-ordinating the attacks from multiple sources to form a DDoS is much easier to define and shows a level of intent to cause harm which is difficult to prove for the standard DoS from a single source without making normal operations illegal.

conduit here is from the term "mere conduit", where the isp just acts like a pipe or tube. What I don't understand is how an ISP which monitors traffic with a system like Phorm can give the "mere conduit" defense to allowing illegal content to flow over their network. It was my understanding that you could maintain "mere conduit" status when you only monitor traffic for network operations and maintenance reasons and that if you went beyond this then you lost the "mere conduit" status and became libel to some extent for the traffic flowing over your network. What I don't know is whether the defense of only being able to montior certain types of traffic holds , i.e. web surfing and not p2p.