Investigating Survivability of Configuration Management Tools in Unreliable and Hostile Networks

A configuration management system (CMS) can control large networks of computers. A modern CMS is idempotent and describes infrastructure as code, so that it uses a description of the desired state of a system to automatically correct any deviations from a defined goal. As this requires both complete control of the slave systems and unquestioned ability to provide new instructions to slaves, the CMS is highly valuable target for attackers. Criminal malware networks already survive in hostile, heterogeneous networks, and therefore, the concepts from those systems could be applied to benign enterprise CMSs. We describe one such concept, the hidden master architecture, and compare its survivability to existing systems using attack trees

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

Social Media Advertising and Product Development for an Online Lending Platform in India

This project team researched alternative banking strategies while in Hangzhou, China to assist Qianli Technologies and Onion Credit, Qianli’s partner in India. Our goal was to create recommendations for future loan products and social media advertising for an online lending platform in India. The team achieved this through interviews, a competitor analysis, online surveys of current and potential customers, and a social media platform analysis. The investigation showed that the surveyed users and university students prefer loans of a longer term and larger amount than Onion Credit’s platform currently offers. From the survey results and a social media platform analysis, we determined that Facebook and Instagram provide the best opportunities for an efficient future marketing campaign

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Network Neutrality: A Research Guide

The conclusion in a research handbook should emphasise the complexity of the problem than trying to claim a one-size-fits-all solution. I have categorised net neutrality into positive and negative (content discrimination) net neutrality indicating the latter as potentially harmful. Blocking content without informing customers appropriately is wrong: if it says ‘Internet service’, it should offer an open Internet (alongside walled gardens if that is expressly advertised as such). The issue of uncontrolled Internet flows versus engineered solutions is central to the question of a ‘free’ versus regulated Internet. A consumer- and citizen-orientated intervention depends on passing regulations to prevent unregulated nontransparent controls exerted over traffic via DPI equipment, whether imposed by ISPs for financial advantage or by governments eager to use this new technology to filter, censor and enforce copyright against their citizens. Unraveling the previous ISP limited liability regime risks removing the efficiency of that approach in permitting the free flow of information for economic and social advantage. These conclusions support a light-touch regulatory regime involving reporting requirements and co-regulation with, as far as is possible, market-based solutions. Solutions may be international as well as local, and international coordination of best practice and knowledge will enable national regulators to keep up with the technology ‘arms race’

Understanding the Detection of View Fraud in Video Content Portals

While substantial effort has been devoted to understand fraudulent activity in traditional online advertising (search and banner), more recent forms such as video ads have received little attention. The understanding and identification of fraudulent activity (i.e., fake views) in video ads for advertisers, is complicated as they rely exclusively on the detection mechanisms deployed by video hosting portals. In this context, the development of independent tools able to monitor and audit the fidelity of these systems are missing today and needed by both industry and regulators. In this paper we present a first set of tools to serve this purpose. Using our tools, we evaluate the performance of the audit systems of five major online video portals. Our results reveal that YouTube's detection system significantly outperforms all the others. Despite this, a systematic evaluation indicates that it may still be susceptible to simple attacks. Furthermore, we find that YouTube penalizes its videos' public and monetized view counters differently, the former being more aggressive. This means that views identified as fake and discounted from the public view counter are still monetized. We speculate that even though YouTube's policy puts in lots of effort to compensate users after an attack is discovered, this practice places the burden of the risk on the advertisers, who pay to get their ads displayed.Comment: To appear in WWW 2016, Montr\'eal, Qu\'ebec, Canada. Please cite the conference version of this pape

Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts