UC Santa Cruz

Generative AI services often gate access behind per-user subscriptions, API keys, and manual endpoint configuration. These are barriers that often scale with the number of users and applications on a network. Saturn, the central contribution of my thesis, provisions AI the way printers and speakers already provision themselves: through Multicast DNS (mDNS) and DNS-based Service Discovery (DNS-SD), network protocols that ship on every major operating system. With Saturn, AI endpoints register under the service type saturn. tcp.local. and every device on the network discovers them without accounts, credentials, or configuration files. This thesis contributes the Saturn protocol specification, six reference implementations across four languages, and an on-device deployment on a consumer-grade wireless router.