173 research outputs found

    Botnet lab creation with open source tools and usefulness of such a tool for researchers

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    Botnets are large scale networks, which can span across the internet and comprise of computers, which have been infected by malicious software and are centrally controlled from a remote location. Botnets pose a great security risk and their size has been rising drastically over the past few years. The use of botnets by the underground community as a medium for online crime, bundled with their use for profit has shined the spotlight on them. Numerous researchers have proposed and designed infrastructures and frameworks that identify newly formed botnets and their traffic patterns. In this research, the design of a unified modular open source laboratory is proposed, with the use of virtual machines and open source tools, which can be used in analyzing and dissecting newly found bots in the wild. Furthermore, the usefulness and flexibility of the open source laboratory is evaluated by infecting my test machines with the Zeus Bot

    NetServ Framework Design and Implementation 1.0

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    Eyeball ISPs today are under-utilizing an important asset: edge routers. We present NetServ, a programmable node architecture aimed at turning edge routers into distributed service hosting platforms. This allows ISPs to allocate router resources to content publishers and application service pro\-vi\-ders motivated to deploy content and services at the network edge. This model provides important benefits over currently available solutions like CDN. Content and services can be brought closer to end users by dynamically installing and removing custom modules as needed throughout the network. Unlike previous programmable router proposals which focused on customizing features of a router, NetServ focuses on deploying content and services. All our design decisions reflect this change in focus. We set three main design goals: a wide-area deployment, a multi-user execution environment, and a clear economic benefit. We built a prototype using Linux, NSIS signaling, and the Java OSGi framework. We also implemented four prototype applications: ActiveCDN provides publisher-specific content distribution and processing; KeepAlive Responder and Media Relay reduce the infrastructure needs of telephony providers; and Overload Control makes it possible to deploy more flexible algorithms to handle excessive traffic

    Using virtualisation to create a more secure online banking infrastructure

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    M.Sc. (Computer Science)Sim swop, Phishing, Zeus and SpyEye are all terms that may be found in articles concerning online banking fraud. Home users are unsure of how the configuration of their computers affects the risk profile for conducting online banking. Software installed by a home user on their computer may be malware designed to steal banking details. Customers expect banks to provide a safe online banking system. The challenge that banks have is that they cannot control the configuration that exists on a client operating system. The V-Bank system was designed to determine whether virtualisation can be used as a means to increase the security for online banking. The V-Bank system uses a virtual machine that is run from a guest that is single purpose, read-only and fulfils the configuration requirements that the bank has for a client system. The V-Bank system also utilises public and private key encryption for identification, authentication and authorisation mechanisms in the online banking system. The architecture of the V-Bank system defines online banking as an end-to-end system. It approaches online banking as a system that consists of three major components. The three major components is a client-side component, network and server-side environment. The V-Bank system gives banks the ability to provide customers with a system that is controlled from the client, through the network to the server. The V-Bank system demonstrates that virtualisation can be used to increase the security of online banking

    A service-oriented architecture for scientific computing on cloud infrastructures

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    This paper describes a service-oriented architecture that eases the process of scientific application deployment and execution in IaaS Clouds, with a focus on High Throughput Computing applications. The system integrates i) a catalogue and repository of Virtual Machine Images, ii) an application deployment and configuration tool, iii) a meta-scheduler for job execution management and monitoring. The developed system significantly reduces the time required to port a scientific application to these computational environments. This is exemplified by a case study with a computationally intensive protein design application on both a private Cloud and a hybrid three-level infrastructure (Grid, private and public Cloud).The authors wish to thank the financial support received from the Generalitat Valenciana for the project GV/2012/076 and to the Ministerio de Econom´ıa y Competitividad for the project CodeCloud (TIN2010-17804)Moltó, G.; Calatrava Arroyo, A.; Hernández García, V. (2013). A service-oriented architecture for scientific computing on cloud infrastructures. En High Performance Computing for Computational Science - VECPAR 2012. Springer Verlag (Germany). 163-176. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38718-0_18S163176Vaquero, L.M., Rodero-Merino, L., Caceres, J., Lindner, M.: A break in the clouds. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 39(1), 50 (2008)Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A.: Above the clouds: A berkeley view of cloud computing. Technical report, UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (2009)Rehr, J., Vila, F., Gardner, J., Svec, L., Prange, M.: Scientific computing in the cloud. Computing in Science 99 (2010)Keahey, K., Figueiredo, R., Fortes, J., Freeman, T., Tsugawa, M.: Science Clouds: Early Experiences in Cloud Computing for Scientific Applications. In: Cloud Computing and its Applications (2008)Carrión, J.V., Moltó, G., De Alfonso, C., Caballer, M., Hernández, V.: A Generic Catalog and Repository Service for Virtual Machine Images. In: 2nd International ICST Conference on Cloud Computing (CloudComp 2010) (2010)Moltó, G., Hernández, V., Alonso, J.: A service-oriented WSRF-based architecture for metascheduling on computational Grids. Future Generation Computer Systems 24(4), 317–328 (2008)Krishnan, S., Clementi, L., Ren, J., Papadopoulos, P., Li, W.: Design and Evaluation of Opal2: A Toolkit for Scientific Software as a Service. In: 2009 IEEE Congress on Services (2009)Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF): The Open Virtualization Format Specification (Technical report)Raman, R., Livny, M., Solomon, M.: Matchmaking: Distributed Resource Management for High Throughput Computing. In: Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing, pp. 28–31 (1998)Wei, J., Zhang, X., Ammons, G., Bala, V., Ning, P.: Managing security of virtual machine images in a cloud environment. ACM Press, New York (2009)Keahey, K., Freeman, T.: Contextualization: Providing One-Click Virtual Clusters. In: Fourth IEEE International Conference on eScience, pp. 301–308 (2008)Foster, I.: Globus toolkit version 4: Software for service-oriented systems. Journal of Computer Science and Technology 21(4), 513–520 (2006)Moltó, G., Suárez, M., Tortosa, P., Alonso, J.M., Hernández, V., Jaramillo, A.: Protein design based on parallel dimensional reduction. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 49(5), 1261–1271 (2009)Calatrava, A.: In: Use of Grid and Cloud Hybrid Infrastructures for Scientific Computing (M.Sc. Thesis in Spanish), Universitat Politècnica de València (2012)Keahey, K., Freeman, T., Lauret, J., Olson, D.: Virtual workspaces for scientific applications. Journal of Physics: Conference Series 78(1), 012038 (2007)Pallickara, S., Pierce, M., Dong, Q., Kong, C.: Enabling Large Scale Scientific Computations for Expressed Sequence Tag Sequencing over Grid and Cloud Computing Clusters. In: Eigth International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2009), Citeseer (2009)Merzky, A., Stamou, K., Jha, S.: Application Level Interoperability between Clouds and Grids. In: 2009 Workshops at the Grid and Pervasive Computing Conference, pp. 143–150 (2009)Thain, D., Tannenbaum, T., Livny, M.: Distributed computing in practice: the Condor experience. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 17(2-4), 323–356 (2005)Simmhan, Y., van Ingen, C., Subramanian, G., Li, J.: Bridging the Gap between Desktop and the Cloud for eScience Applications. In: 2010 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing, pp. 474–481. IEEE (2010)Chappell, D.: Introducing windows azure. Technical report (2009

    Autoscaling Hadoop Clusters

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    Pilve arvutused on viimaste aastate jooksul palju kõneainet pakkunud. Alates sellest, et tegemist ei ole millegi muuga kui virtualiseerimine ilusa nimega, kuni selleni, et tulevik on pilve arvutuste p aralt. Juba 4 aastat on virtuaalsed serverid, andmehoidlad, andmebaasid ja muud infrastruktuuri elemendid olnud k attesaadavad veebiteenustena. Antud töös me ehitame ise sklaleeruva MapReduce platvormi, mis baseerub vabalähtekoodiga tarkvara Apache Hadoop projektil. Antud platvorm skaleerib end ise, vastavalt serverite koormatusele k aivitab uusi servereid, et kiirendada arvutusprotsessi.Cloud computing, specifically Infrastructure as a Service model provides us with the facilities to provision new servers at will and increase the computing power of a cluster almost in real time. This provisioning and deprovisioning of servers can happen automatically based on some performance metrics of the cluster. We introduce a framework of autoscaling clusters in the private and public cloud ecosystem using the Eucalyptus and AWS software stack and use MapReduce as the service provided by the cluster

    Biological Network Exploration with Cytoscape 3

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    Cytoscape is one of the most popular open‐source software tools for the visual exploration of biomedical networks composed of protein, gene, and other types of interactions. It offers researchers a versatile and interactive visualization interface for exploring complex biological interconnections supported by diverse annotation and experimental data, thereby facilitating research tasks such as predicting gene function and constructing pathways. Cytoscape provides core functionality to load, visualize, search, filter, and save networks, and hundreds of Apps extend this functionality to address specific research needs. The latest generation of Cytoscape (version 3.0 and later) has substantial improvements in function, user interface, and performance relative to previous versions. This protocol aims to jump‐start new users with specific protocols for basic Cytoscape functions, such as installing Cytoscape and Cytoscape Apps, loading data, visualizing and navigating the networks, visualizing network associated data (attributes), and identifying clusters. It also highlights new features that benefit experienced users. Curr. Protoc. Bioinform. 47:8.13.1‐8.13.24. © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143619/1/cpbi0813.pd

    Progressive Network Deployment, Performance, and Control with Software-defined Networking

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    The inflexible nature of traditional computer networks has led to tightly-integrated systems that are inherently difficult to manage and secure. New designs move low-level network control into software creating software-defined networks (SDN). Augmenting an existing network with these enhancements can be expensive and complex. This research investigates solutions to these problems. It is hypothesized that an add-on device, or shim could be used to make a traditional switch behave as an OpenFlow SDN switch while maintaining reasonable performance. A design prototype is found to cause approximately 1.5% reduction in throughput for one ow and less than double increase in latency, showing that such a solution may be feasible. It is hypothesized that a new design built on event-loop and reactive programming may yield a controller that is higher-performing and easier to program. The library node-openflow is found to have performance approaching that of professional controllers, however it exhibits higher variability in response rate. The framework rxdn is found to exceed performance of two comparable controllers by at least 33% with statistical significance in latency mode with 16 simulated switches, but is slower than the library node-openflow or professional controllers (e.g., Libfluid, ONOS, and NOX). Collectively, this work enhances the tools available to researchers, enabling experimentation and development toward more sustainable and secure infrastructur

    Developing sustainability pathways for social simulation tools and services

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    The use of cloud technologies to teach agent-based modelling and simulation (ABMS) is an interesting application of a nascent technological paradigm that has received very little attention in the literature. This report fills that gap and aims to help instructors, teachers and demonstrators to understand why and how cloud services are appropriate solutions to common problems they face delivering their study programmes, as well as outlining the many cloud options available. The report first introduces social simulation and considers how social simulation is taught. Following this factors affecting the implementation of agent-based models are explored, with attention focused primarily on the modelling and execution platforms currently available, the challenges associated with implementing agent-based models, and the technical architectures that can be used to support the modelling, simulation and teaching process. This sets the context for an extended discussion on cloud computing including service and deployment models, accessing cloud resources, the financial implications of adopting the cloud, and an introduction to the evaluation of cloud services within the context of developing, executing and teaching agent-based models
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