Penetrating the NAT: Why and how?

Abstract only availableNetwork Address Translators (NATs) that map private addresses to public ones exist between a private computer network and a larger, public domain such as the Internet. The translation of network addresses makes it difficult to establish connections between clients on either side of the NAT, forcing application layer programs to find their own way to navigate across the NAT. Many protocols and methods have been implemented to traverse a NAT, but not all NATs support each of these concepts. This forces newer protocols to be incredibly verbose, containing fall-back measures that allow use of more antiquated protocols if a legacy NAT device is encountered. Our goal was to conduct a survey considering many of these protocols and methods to determine the advantages and disadvantages of each and under what circumstances they should be used. This clearly defined set of data should be used as a guideline for creating a standard for NAT traversal techniques. This information was collected primarily from documents published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and examining the source code of applications that utilize these methods. Using such detailed documents to cite from, we were able to have a good grasp of the intricacies of the methodology, allowing the insight to examine how these techniques can work together in a meaningful manner. Hopefully, this standardization will allow less overhead in the application layer, as well as allow an easier transition from IPv4 to IPv6.NSF-REU Program in Home Networking Technologie

VIoLET: A Large-scale Virtual Environment for Internet of Things

IoT deployments have been growing manifold, encompassing sensors, networks, edge, fog and cloud resources. Despite the intense interest from researchers and practitioners, most do not have access to large-scale IoT testbeds for validation. Simulation environments that allow analytical modeling are a poor substitute for evaluating software platforms or application workloads in realistic computing environments. Here, we propose VIoLET, a virtual environment for defining and launching large-scale IoT deployments within cloud VMs. It offers a declarative model to specify container-based compute resources that match the performance of the native edge, fog and cloud devices using Docker. These can be inter-connected by complex topologies on which private/public networks, and bandwidth and latency rules are enforced. Users can configure synthetic sensors for data generation on these devices as well. We validate VIoLET for deployments with > 400 devices and > 1500 device-cores, and show that the virtual IoT environment closely matches the expected compute and network performance at modest costs. This fills an important gap between IoT simulators and real deployments.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 24TH International European Conference On Parallel and Distributed Computing (EURO-PAR), August 27-31, 2018, Turin, Italy, europar2018.org. Selected as a Distinguished Paper for presentation at the Plenary Session of the conferenc

An Analysis and Enumeration of the Blockchain and Future Implications

The blockchain is a relatively new technology that has grown in interest and potential research since its inception. Blockchain technology is dominated by cryptocurrency in terms of usage. Research conducted in the past few years, however, reveals blockchain has the potential to revolutionize several different industries. The blockchain consists of three major technologies: a peer-to-peer network, a distributed database, and asymmetrically encrypted transactions. The peer-to-peer network enables a decentralized, consensus-based network structure where various nodes contribute to the overall network performance. A distributed database adds additional security and immutability to the network. The process of cryptographically securing individual transactions forms a core service of the blockchain and enables semi-anonymous user network presence