Teaching networks in the cloud

The Web is populated by a growing number of services that provide access to remote IT resources: they are col- lectively addressed as the Cloud. Such incoherent and expanding number of services is investigated to find those that can help the task of teaching, focusing on a challenging case study for which I have a direct experience: a course in computer networks with the purpose of giving the students a hands-on experience using production-grade techniques. The outcome of the case study is that on-line services can complement traditional frontal lectures, to enrich the communi- cation between the teacher and the student, and to improve the learning experience. This is a hint for teachers, and characterizes a potential market for developers and providers

Design and implementation of a semi-automated threat analysis system -Tartarus-

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the number of cyberattacks caused by the change in the work model due to the pandemic. People were forced to work at home, away from the secure confines of a corporate network. Moreover, in the coming years the number, intensity and variety of these attacks are expected to keep increasing. Therefore, it is of vital importance to constantly track and adapt to the new techniques, vulnerabilities and malware used by the cybercriminals to understand your level of exposure against these new threats. This project aims to implement a semi-automated threat analysis system that can distribute and execute malware samples into sandboxed virtual machines. Once it has been executed, this system retrieves metrics of the results of each execution to observe the detection and blocking capacity of the machine against these threats

Introducing Development Features for Virtualized Network Services

Network virtualization and softwarizing network functions are trends aiming at higher network efficiency, cost reduction and agility. They are driven by the evolution in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This shows that software will play an increasingly important role within telecommunication services, which were previously dominated by hardware appliances. Service providers can benefit from this, as it enables faster introduction of new telecom services, combined with an agile set of possibilities to optimize and fine-tune their operations. However, the provided telecom services can only evolve if the adequate software tools are available. In this article, we explain how the development, deployment and maintenance of such an SDN/NFV-based telecom service puts specific requirements on the platform providing it. A Software Development Kit (SDK) is introduced, allowing service providers to adequately design, test and evaluate services before they are deployed in production and also update them during their lifetime. This continuous cycle between development and operations, a concept known as DevOps, is a well known strategy in software development. To extend its context further to SDN/NFV-based services, the functionalities provided by traditional cloud platforms are not yet sufficient. By giving an overview of the currently available tools and their limitations, the gaps in DevOps for SDN/NFV services are highlighted. The benefit of such an SDK is illustrated by a secure content delivery network service (enhanced with deep packet inspection and elastic routing capabilities). With this use-case, the dynamics between developing and deploying a service are further illustrated

Vagrant Figures: Law, Labor, and Refusal in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

The archive of vagrancy is a counter-history of economic rationality. In seeking to catalogue and apprehend the non-laboring body, vagrancy law theorizes labor by tracking its refusal. While vagrancy laws had existed in England since the fourteenth century, vagrancy takes on new meaning in the eighteenth century, as labor becomes central to economic theories of value, emergent penitentiary institutions promote work as a mode of criminal rehabilitation, and transatlantic debates over slavery lend new urgency to the problem of defining free labor. When legal, economic, and literary texts invoke vagrancy, they therefore ask a crucial question for this period: what makes people work? Vagrancy law called on its enforcers to interpret and predict the actions of those who (in the words of many eighteenth-century statutes) could give no good account of themselves. Across a wide variety of genres, vagrancy appears not as an identity, but as a proliferation of figures, a picaresque parataxis that links characteristics and behaviors as signs of a common disposition yet refuses identitarian coherence. By figuring social threat as unpredictable mobility, ambiguity, and incoherence, the rhetoric of vagrancy justified an equally expansive mobility and flexibility for police power. By bringing together texts debating crime and poverty in England, the meaning of free labor in the context of slavery in the Caribbean, and the stakes of mobility in the United States, Vagrant Figures reveals how vagrancy linked police power to economic rationality across transnational circuits of commerce, legal thought, and colonial governance. As economic reasoning informed the management of colonies and the imaginative apprehension of the global, vagrancy came to signify threat to the global enterprises of capitalism and colonial expansion. At the same time, however, the power of vagrancy\u27s rhetoric became a resource for authors seeking to challenge or critique police power. Through readings of authors including Jane Barker, Henry Fielding, Charles Brockden Brown, Edward Long,William Earle, Karl Marx, and Adam Smith, this project traces the resolutely figurative workings of political economy and police power in the long eighteenth century, as both theorized human perception and interiority through registers of the imaginative and rhetorical

SOFTWARE DEFINED CUSTOMIZATION OF NETWORK PROTOCOLS WITH LAYER 4.5

The rise of software defined networks, programmable data planes, and host level kernel programmability gives rise to highly specialized enterprise networks. One form of network specialization is protocol customization, which traditionally extends existing protocols with additional features, primarily for security and performance reasons. However, the current methodologies to deploy protocol customizations lack the agility to support rapidly changing customization needs. This dissertation designs and evaluates the first software-defined customization architecture capable of distributing and continuously managing protocol customizations within enterprise or datacenter networks. Our unifying architecture is capable of performing per-process customizations, embedding per-network security controls, and aiding the traversal of customized application flows through otherwise problematic middlebox devices. Through the design and evaluation of the customization architecture, we further our understanding of, and provide robust support for, application transparent protocol customizations. We conclude with the first ever demonstration of active application flow "hot-swapping" of protocol customizations, a capability not currently supported in operational networks.Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA 22203Lieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited