Linux XIA: an interoperable meta network architecture

With the growing number of clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This thesis presents the eXpressive Internet (Meta) Architecture (XIA), itself a clean-slate design, as well as Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. As a meta network architecture, XIA is highly flexible, leaving stakeholders to choose an expressive set of network principals to instantiate a given network architecture within the XIA framework. Central to XIA is its novel, non-linear network addressing format, from which derive key architectural features such as evolvability, intrinsically secure identifiers, and a low degree of principal isolation. XIP, the network layer protocol of XIA, forwards packets by navigating these structured addresses and delegating the decision-making and packet processing to appropriate principals, accordingly. Taken together, these mechanisms work in tandem to support a broad spectrum of interoperable principals. We demonstrate how to port four distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA, none of which were designed for interoperability with this platform. We then show that, notwithstanding this flexibility, Linux XIA's forwarding performance remains comparable to that of the more mature legacy TCP/IP stack implementation. Moreover, the ported architectures, namely IP, Serval, NDN, and ANTS, empower us to present a deployment plan for XIA, to explore design variations of the ported architectures that were impossible in their original form due to the requirement of self-sufficiency that a standalone network architecture bears, and to substantiate the claim that XIA readily supports and enables network evolution. Our work highlights the benefits of specializing network designs that XIA affords, and comprises instructive examples for the network researcher interested in design and implementation for future interoperability

Accessing regulated digital infrastructures: a case study of the UK's retail payment infrastructure

This research examines how heterogeneous actors gain access to regulated digital infrastructures. As industries, businesses and customers increasingly adopt digital means, markets can shift to industry infrastructure. Market infrastructures are often regulated to ensure service quality and are dominated by incumbents due to high entry barriers. Resolving tensions between heterogeneous actors of digital platforms has been studied; however, there is a dearth of understanding of how the social-technical complexities of regulated digital infrastructure are resolved. In this research, I conducted an in-depth study of the UK’s real-time retail payment infrastructure and how third-party service providers, Fintechs, gained access to the infrastructure. The high level of heterogeneous actors, both at the infrastructure level and externally at the regulatory and policy levels, provided a rich context to explore this issue. I draw on Pickering’s theoretical lens of the Mangle of Practice and subsequent research extending it to understand how sociotechnical resistances emanating from interactions of the material agency of the legacy heavy systems, disciplinary agency arising from the need to maintain financial system stability and agency of heterogeneous actors are accommodated to reach different goals of actors. The findings indicate the overwhelming influence of disciplinary agency over the agencies of all other actors and elements. Thus resulting in processes of recursive tuning of digital infrastructure rules to balance innovation and competition while continuously maintaining system stability. Further, the presence of resistances creates new classes of actors and services that tune the resistances for the Fintechs, enabling them to reach their original or modified goals. Further, the occasional regulatory triggers imposed by policy and macro regulatory levels on the incumbents resulted in the infrastructure being remodelled for new goals after the triggers. This pattern thus makes the evolution of the infrastructure less organic and more administered

Professional English for the students of Electronic Education Institute in specialty of «Informatics and Computer Technologies»

Пособие предназначено для студентов 3 курса ИнЭО, изучающих профессиональный курс английского языка по направлению 09.03.01 «Информатика и вычислительная техника»

Professional English for the students of Electronic Education Institute in specialty of «Informatics and Computer Technologies»

Пособие предназначено для студентов 3 курса ИнЭО, изучающих профессиональный курс английского языка по направлению 09.03.01 «Информатика и вычислительная техника»

A re-evaluation of Joyce Grenfell as socio-political commentator

The objective of this thesis is to re-evaluate Joyce Grenfell and her monologues as sociopolitical commentary set within what the Wave Model of Feminism considers a dormant period. The challenges of the Wave Model are addressed, encompassing other models such as the Kaleidoscope model, in an attempt to reconcile the issues of the Wave Model with the realities of a splintered but active set of feminisms throughout Wartime and Reconstruction Britain. This proposition is underpinned by a literature review covering feminism from the 1920s to the 1970s. This reveals a faulty acceptance in the record that feminism was dormant from the achievement of women’s suffrage in the UK and America until the mid-1960s. While I acknowledge that theory-based feminist writing from an Anglo-American perspective was lacking during this time, the record of women working in new fields, challenging the marriage bar and taking other activist steps suggests that this period is a time of activity that is currently overlooked; women doing feminism by acting upon and widening the opportunities available. The theoretical framework and methodology have been refined throughout the analytical process. Using the 1953 translation of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a primary feminist resource, and coming from an interpretivist standpoint, the research is framed by Foucauldian interpretations of power/knowledge and discourse analysis. An in-depth analysis of Grenfell’s creations concludes that her work is a socio-political commentary of great value to feminists and historians of feminism. It concludes that Grenfell was an astute observer, thinker and commentator with an awareness of women’s issues, who can be framed within a broad and strong feminist reading

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Practical Analysis of Encrypted Network Traffic

The growing use of encryption in network communications is an undoubted boon for user privacy. However, the limitations of real-world encryption schemes are still not well understood, and new side-channel attacks against encrypted communications are disclosed every year. Furthermore, encrypted network communications, by preventing inspection of packet contents, represent a significant challenge from a network security perspective: our existing infrastructure relies on such inspection for threat detection. Both problems are exacerbated by the increasing prevalence of encrypted traffic: recent estimates suggest that 65% or more of downstream Internet traffic will be encrypted by the end of 2016. This work addresses these problems by expanding our understanding of the properties and characteristics of encrypted network traffic and exploring new, specialized techniques for the handling of encrypted traffic by network monitoring systems. We first demonstrate that opaque traffic, of which encrypted traffic is a subset, can be identified in real-time and how this ability can be leveraged to improve the capabilities of existing IDS systems. To do so, we evaluate and compare multiple methods for rapid identification of opaque packets, ultimately pinpointing a simple hypothesis test (which can be implemented on an FPGA) as an efficient and effective detector of such traffic. In our experiments, using this technique to “winnow”, or filter, opaque packets from the traffic load presented to an IDS system significantly increased the throughput of the system, allowing the identification of many more potential threats than the same system without winnowing. Second, we show that side channels in encrypted VoIP traffic enable the reconstruction of approximate transcripts of conversations. Our approach leverages techniques from linguistics, machine learning, natural language processing, and machine translation to accomplish this task despite the limited information leaked by such side channels. Our ability to do so underscores both the potential threat to user privacy which such side channels represent and the degree to which this threat has been underestimated. Finally, we propose and demonstrate the effectiveness of a new paradigm for identifying HTTP resources retrieved over encrypted connections. Our experiments demonstrate how the predominant paradigm from prior work fails to accurately represent real-world situations and how our proposed approach offers significant advantages, including the ability to infer partial information, in comparison. We believe these results represent both an enhanced threat to user privacy and an opportunity for network monitors and analysts to improve their own capabilities with respect to encrypted traffic.Doctor of Philosoph

An evaluation of a communication process between the Gauteng Provincial Government and development forums in the mid-1990s

No abstract availableDissertation (MA (Development Communication))--University of Pretoria, 2008.Information Scienceunrestricte