TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Creation of value with open source software in the telecommunications field

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Les opérateurs sauront-ils survivre dans un monde en constante évolution? Considérations techniques conduisant à des scénarios de rupture

Le secteur des télécommunications passe par une phase délicate en raison de profondes mutations technologiques, principalement motivées par le développement de l'Internet. Elles ont un impact majeur sur l'industrie des télécommunications dans son ensemble et, par conséquent, sur les futurs déploiements des nouveaux réseaux, plateformes et services. L'évolution de l'Internet a un impact particulièrement fort sur les opérateurs des télécommunications (Telcos). En fait, l'industrie des télécommunications est à la veille de changements majeurs en raison de nombreux facteurs, comme par exemple la banalisation progressive de la connectivité, la domination dans le domaine des services de sociétés du web (Webcos), l'importance croissante de solutions à base de logiciels et la flexibilité qu'elles introduisent (par rapport au système statique des opérateurs télécoms). Cette thèse élabore, propose et compare les scénarios possibles basés sur des solutions et des approches qui sont technologiquement viables. Les scénarios identifiés couvrent un large éventail de possibilités: 1) Telco traditionnel; 2) Telco transporteur de Bits; 3) Telco facilitateur de Plateforme; 4) Telco fournisseur de services; 5) Disparition des Telco. Pour chaque scénario, une plateforme viable (selon le point de vue des opérateurs télécoms) est décrite avec ses avantages potentiels et le portefeuille de services qui pourraient être fournisThe telecommunications industry is going through a difficult phase because of profound technological changes, mainly originated by the development of the Internet. They have a major impact on the telecommunications industry as a whole and, consequently, the future deployment of new networks, platforms and services. The evolution of the Internet has a particularly strong impact on telecommunications operators (Telcos). In fact, the telecommunications industry is on the verge of major changes due to many factors, such as the gradual commoditization of connectivity, the dominance of web services companies (Webcos), the growing importance of software based solutions that introduce flexibility (compared to static system of telecom operators). This thesis develops, proposes and compares plausible future scenarios based on future solutions and approaches that will be technologically feasible and viable. Identified scenarios cover a wide range of possibilities: 1) Traditional Telco; 2) Telco as Bit Carrier; 3) Telco as Platform Provider; 4) Telco as Service Provider; 5) Telco Disappearance. For each scenario, a viable platform (from the point of view of telecom operators) is described highlighting the enabled service portfolio and its potential benefitsEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

A Secure Peer-to-Peer Application Framework

The nature of the Internet has changed dramatically. From a modest research network, it has evolved into one of the most important fabrics of our modern society, affecting the lives of billions each day. We rely on it for everything from performing our daily chores to accessing rich media and keeping in touch with our friends. Despite this change, service provisioning has largely remained intact. Services are provided in a centralized manner, resulting in bottlenecks and vulnerable collections of, often unwittingly, submitted sensitive information. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have the potential to provide a better alternative for future networking. P2P services distribute the load from a single node to a network of peers, relying on the resources of the end-users themselves. Not only does it remove the bottlenecks, it has the potential to provide a more personal and safe networking environment. In this dissertation, we inspect the feasibility and implications of a generic, cross-application, P2P framework. We present the design and implementation of a framework that uses existing infrastructure and advanced networking protocols to create a secure environment. Using this framework, applications are able to benefit from P2P networking without having to deploy new infrastructure or implement complex connection- and identity management. Users benefit from using a single, strong, cross-application identity management and having better control over their data. This improves the trust within the system and enables new ways of dealing with security threats. We demonstrate the feasibility of the framework by evaluating the performance and usability of the prototype implementation. This provides a model for future networking applications and insight into the security and usability issues these will face

Darknet as a Source of Cyber Threat Intelligence: Investigating Distributed and Reflection Denial of Service Attacks

Cyberspace has become a massive battlefield between computer criminals and computer security experts. In addition, large-scale cyber attacks have enormously matured and became capable to generate, in a prompt manner, significant interruptions and damage to Internet resources and infrastructure. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are perhaps the most prominent and severe types of such large-scale cyber attacks. Furthermore, the existence of widely available encryption and anonymity techniques greatly increases the difficulty of the surveillance and investigation of cyber attacks. In this context, the availability of relevant cyber monitoring is of paramount importance. An effective approach to gather DoS cyber intelligence is to collect and analyze traffic destined to allocated, routable, yet unused Internet address space known as darknet. In this thesis, we leverage big darknet data to generate insights on various DoS events, namely, Distributed DoS (DDoS) and Distributed Reflection DoS (DRDoS) activities. First, we present a comprehensive survey of darknet. We primarily define and characterize darknet and indicate its alternative names. We further list other trap-based monitoring systems and compare them to darknet. In addition, we provide a taxonomy in relation to darknet technologies and identify research gaps that are related to three main darknet categories: deployment, traffic analysis, and visualization. Second, we characterize darknet data. Such information could generate indicators of cyber threat activity as well as provide in-depth understanding of the nature of its traffic. Particularly, we analyze darknet packets distribution, its used transport, network and application layer protocols and pinpoint its resolved domain names. Furthermore, we identify its IP classes and destination ports as well as geo-locate its source countries. We further investigate darknet-triggered threats. The aim is to explore darknet inferred threats and categorize their severities. Finally, we contribute by exploring the inter-correlation of such threats, by applying association rule mining techniques, to build threat association rules. Specifically, we generate clusters of threats that co-occur targeting a specific victim. Third, we propose a DDoS inference and forecasting model that aims at providing insights to organizations, security operators and emergency response teams during and after a DDoS attack. Specifically, this work strives to predict, within minutes, the attacks’ features, namely, intensity/rate (packets/sec) and size (estimated number of compromised machines/bots). The goal is to understand the future short-term trend of the ongoing DDoS attacks in terms of those features and thus provide the capability to recognize the current as well as future similar situations and hence appropriately respond to the threat. Further, our work aims at investigating DDoS campaigns by proposing a clustering approach to infer various victims targeted by the same campaign and predicting related features. To achieve our goal, our proposed approach leverages a number of time series and fluctuation analysis techniques, statistical methods and forecasting approaches. Fourth, we propose a novel approach to infer and characterize Internet-scale DRDoS attacks by leveraging the darknet space. Complementary to the pioneer work on inferring DDoS activities using darknet, this work shows that we can extract DoS activities without relying on backscattered analysis. The aim of this work is to extract cyber security intelligence related to DRDoS activities such as intensity, rate and geographic location in addition to various network-layer and flow-based insights. To achieve this task, the proposed approach exploits certain DDoS parameters to detect the attacks and the expectation maximization and k-means clustering techniques in an attempt to identify campaigns of DRDoS attacks. Finally, we conclude this work by providing some discussions and pinpointing some future work

Satellite Communications

This study is motivated by the need to give the reader a broad view of the developments, key concepts, and technologies related to information society evolution, with a focus on the wireless communications and geoinformation technologies and their role in the environment. Giving perspective, it aims at assisting people active in the industry, the public sector, and Earth science fields as well, by providing a base for their continued work and thinking

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

JTIT

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