MiniCPS: A toolkit for security research on CPS Networks

In recent years, tremendous effort has been spent to modernizing communication infrastructure in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and related Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. While a great amount of research has been conducted on network security of office and home networks, recently the security of CPS and related systems has gained a lot of attention. Unfortunately, real-world CPS are often not open to security researchers, and as a result very few reference systems and topologies are available. In this work, we present MiniCPS, a CPS simulation toolbox intended to alleviate this problem. The goal of MiniCPS is to create an extensible, reproducible research environment targeted to communications and physical-layer interactions in CPS. MiniCPS builds on Mininet to provide lightweight real-time network emulation, and extends Mininet with tools to simulate typical CPS components such as programmable logic controllers, which use industrial protocols (Ethernet/IP, Modbus/TCP). In addition, MiniCPS defines a simple API to enable physical-layer interaction simulation. In this work, we demonstrate applications of MiniCPS in two example scenarios, and show how MiniCPS can be used to develop attacks and defenses that are directly applicable to real systems.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 1 code listin

Network emulation focusing on QoS-Oriented satellite communication

This chapter proposes network emulation basics and a complete case study of QoS-oriented Satellite Communication

Emulating opportunistic networks with KauNet Triggers

In opportunistic networks the availability of an end-to-end path is no longer required. Instead opportunistic networks may take advantage of temporary connectivity opportunities. Opportunistic networks present a demanding environment for network emulation as the traditional emulation setup, where application/transport endpoints only send and receive packets from the network following a black box approach, is no longer applicable. Opportunistic networking protocols and applications additionally need to react to the dynamics of the underlying network beyond what is conveyed through the exchange of packets. In order to support IP-level emulation evaluations of applications and protocols that react to lower layer events, we have proposed the use of emulation triggers. Emulation triggers can emulate arbitrary cross-layer feedback and can be synchronized with other emulation effects. After introducing the design and implementation of triggers in the KauNet emulator, we describe the integration of triggers with the DTN2 reference implementation and illustrate how the functionality can be used to emulate a classical DTN data-mule scenario

CiTAR - Preserving Software-based Research

In contrast to books or published articles, pure digital output of research projects is more fragile and, thus, more difficult to preserve and more difficult to be made available and to be reused by a wider research community. Not only does a fast-growing format diversity in research data sets require additional software preservation but also today’s computer assisted research disciplines increasingly devote significant resources into creating new digital resources and software-based methods. In order to adapt FAIR data principles, especially to ensure re-usability of a wide variety of research outputs, novel ways for preservation of software and additional digital resources are required as well as their integration into existing research data management strategies. This article addresses preservation challenges and preservation options of containers and virtual machines to encapsulate software-based research methods as portable and preservable software-based research resources, provides a preservation plan as well as an implementation. &nbsp

A Survey on Emulation Testbeds for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

AbstractMobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) can be said as a collection of mobile nodes, which builds a dynamic topology and a A resource constrained network. In this paper, we present a survey of various testbeds for Mobile Ad hoc Networks. Emulator provides environment without modifications to the software and validates software solutions for ad hoc network. A field test will show rather the simulation work is going on right track or not and going from the simulator to the real thing directly to analyze the performance and compare the results of routing protocols and mobility models. Analyzing and choosing an appropriate emulator according to the given environment is a time-consuming process. We contribute a survey of emulation testbeds for the choice of appropriate research tools in the mobile ad hoc networks

Faithful reproduction of network experiments

The proliferation of cloud computing has compelled the research community to rethink fundamental aspects of network systems and architectures. However, the tools commonly used to evaluate new ideas have not kept abreast of the latest developments. Common simulation and emulation frameworks fail to provide scalability, fidelity, reproducibility and execute unmodified code, all at the same time. We present SELENA, a Xen-based network emulation framework that offers fully reproducible experiments via its automation interface and supports the use of unmodified guest operating systems. This allows out-of-the-box compatibility with common applications and OS components, such as network stacks and filesystems. In order to faithfully emulate faster and larger networks, SELENA adopts the technique of time-dilation and transparently slows down the passage of time for guest operating systems. This technique effectively virtualizes the availability of host’s hardware resources and allows the replication of scenarios with increased I/O and computational demands. Users can directly control the tradeoff between fidelity and running-times via intuitive tuning knobs. We evaluate the ability of SELENA to faithfully replicate the behaviour of real systems and compare it against existing popular experimentation platforms. Our results suggest that SELENA can accurately model networks with aggregate link speeds of 44 Gbps or more, while improving by four times the execution time in comparison to ns3 and exhibits near-linear scaling properties.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM via http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2658260.265827

How Long Can We Build It? Ensuring Usability of a Scientific Code Base

Software and in particular source code became an important component of scientific publications and henceforth is now subject of research data management.  Maintaining source code such that it remains a usable and a valuable scientific contribution is and remains a huge task. Not all code contributions can be actively maintained forever. Eventually, there will be a significant backlog of legacy source-code. In this article we analyse the requirements for applying the concept of long-term reusability to source code. We use simple case study to identify gaps and provide a technical infrastructure based on emulator to support automated builds of historic software in form of source code. &nbsp