Centralized prevention of denial of service attacks

The world has come to depend on the Internet at an increasing rate for communication, e-commerce, and many other essential services. As such, the Internet has become an integral part of the workings of society at large. This has lead to an increased vulnerability to remotely controlled disruption of vital commercial and government operations---with obvious implications. This disruption can be caused by an attack on one or more specific networks which will deny service to legitimate users or an attack on the Internet itself by creating large amounts of spurious traffic (which will deny services to many or all networks). Individual organizations can take steps to protect themselves but this does not solve the problem of an Internet wide attack. This thesis focuses on an analysis of the different types of Denial of Service attacks and suggests an approach to prevent both categories by centralized detection and limitation of excessive packet flows

An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance

Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and visualization of its structure through the Tor Metrics project. In contrast, I2P does not rely on centralized directory servers, and thus obtaining a complete view of the network is challenging. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of the I2P network, in which we measure properties including population, churn rate, router type, and the geographic distribution of I2P peers. We find that there are currently around 32K active I2P peers in the network on a daily basis. Of these peers, 14K are located behind NAT or firewalls. Using the collected network data, we examine the blocking resistance of I2P against a censor that wants to prevent access to I2P using address-based blocking techniques. Despite the decentralized characteristics of I2P, we discover that a censor can block more than 95% of peer IP addresses known by a stable I2P client by operating only 10 routers in the network. This amounts to severe network impairment: a blocking rate of more than 70% is enough to cause significant latency in web browsing activities, while blocking more than 90% of peer IP addresses can make the network unusable. Finally, we discuss the security consequences of the network being blocked, and directions for potential approaches to make I2P more resistant to blocking.Comment: 14 pages, To appear in the 2018 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'18

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

A Centralized SDN Architecture for the 5G Cellular Network

In order to meet the increasing demands of high data rate and low latency cellular broadband applications, plans are underway to roll out the Fifth Generation (5G) cellular wireless system by the year 2020. This paper proposes a novel method for adapting the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)'s 5G architecture to the principles of Software Defined Networking (SDN). We propose to have centralized network functions in the 5G network core to control the network, end-to-end. This is achieved by relocating the control functionality present in the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) to the network core, resulting in the conversion of the base station known as the gNB into a pure data plane node. This brings about a significant reduction in signaling costs between the RAN and the core network. It also results in improved system performance. The merits of our proposal have been illustrated by evaluating the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the 5G network, such as network attach (registration) time and handover time. We have also demonstrated improvements in attach time and system throughput due to the use of centralized algorithms for mobility management with the help of ns-3 simulations

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms