Filtering Network Traffic Based on Protocol Encapsulation Rules

Packet filtering is a technology at the foundation of many traffic analysis tasks. While languages and tools for packet filtering have been available for many years, none of them supports filters operating on the encapsulation relationships found in each packet. This represents a problem as the number of possible encapsulations used to transport traffic is steadily increasing and we cannot define exactly which packets have to be captured. This paper presents our early work on an algorithm that models protocol filtering patterns (including encapsulation constraints) as Finite State Automata and supports the composition of multiple expressions within the same filter. The resulting, optimized filter is then translated into executable code. The above filtering algorithms are available in the NetBee open source library, which provides some basic tools for handling network packets (e.g., a tcpdump-like program) and APIs to build more advanced tool

Mental Health in the Italian Regions

Istat calculates the mental health index in the Italian regions. The mental health index is a measure of psychological distress obtained from the synthesis of the scores obtained by each individual aged 14 years and over on 5 questions extracted from the SF36-36 Item Short Form Survey questionnaire. The questions refer to the four main dimensions of mental health - anxiety, depression, loss of behavioural or emotional control and psychological well-being. The index varies between 0 and 100, with better psychological well-being conditions as the value of the index increases. Data is available for the period 2016-2022

Relaxing the EU’s Common Position on Cuba would allow Europe to play a more active role in shaping the country’s development

Since 1996, the EU’s Common Position on Cuba has made relations with the country contingent on democratic reforms. William M. LeoGrande assesses whether the EU’s current approach requires updating in light of recent developments within Cuba. He writes that with the United States’ influence undermined by years of hostile policies toward the country, a more conciliatory approach could allow Europe to play a central role in influencing Cuba’s future direction

A Tunnel-aware Language for Network Packet Filtering

Abstract—While in computer networks the number of possible protocol encapsulations is growing day after day, network administrators face ever increasing difficulties in selecting accurately the traffic they need to inspect. This is mainly caused by the limited number of encapsulations supported by currently available tools and the difficulty to exactly specify which packets have to be analyzed, especially in presence of tunneled traffic. This paper presents a novel packet processing language that, besides Boolean filtering predicates, introduces special constructs for handling the more complex situations of tunneled and stacked encapsulations, giving the user a finer control over the semantics of a filtering expression. Even though this language is principally focused on packet filters, it is designed to support other advanced packet processing mechanisms such as traffic classification and field extraction. I

Modeling Complex Packet Filters with Finite State Automata

Designing an efficient and scalable packet filter for modern computer networks becomes each day more challenging: faster link speeds, the steady increase in the number of encapsulation rules (e.g., tunneling) and the necessity to precisely isolate a given subset of traffic cause filtering expressions to become more complex than in the past. Most of current packet filtering mechanisms cannot deal with those requirements because their optimization algorithms either cannot scale with the increased size of the filtering code, or exploit simple domain-specific optimizations that cannot guarantee to operate properly in case of complex filters. This paper presents pFSA, a new model that transforms packet filters into Finite State Automata and guarantees the optimal number of checks on the packet, also in case of multiple filters composition, hence enabling efficiency and scalability without sacrificing filtering computation time

The Mean Deviation from the Median of the Dagum Distribution

The Dagum model is particularly suitable for the analysis of the distributions of economic quantities, such as income, assets and consumption. The purpose of this note is to derive the expression of the mean deviation from the median of the Dagum distribution to study the behavior of the scale and shape parameters in terms of absolute variability and in terms of relative variability

The Determinants of Landscape and Cultural Heritage Among Italian Regions in the Period 2004-2019

We estimate the Landscape and Cultural Heritage among Italian regions in the period 2004-2019 using data from ISTAT-BES. We use Panel Data with Fixed Effects, Panel Data with Random Effects, Pooled OLS, WLS, Dynamic Panel. We found that the Landscape and Cultural Heritage is negatively associated with “Dissatisfaction with the landscape of the place of life”, “Illegal building”, “Density and relevance of the museum heritage”, “Internal material consumption”, “Erosion of the rural space due to abandonment”, “Availability of urban green”, and positively associated with “Pressure from mining activities”, “Erosion of the rural space by urban dispersion”, “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape”, “Diffusion of agritourism farms”, “Current expenditure of the Municipalities for culture”. Secondly, we have realized a cluster analysis with the k-Means algorithm optimized with the Silhouette Coefficient and we found two clusters in the sense of “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape”. Finally, we use eight different machine learning algorithms to predict the level of “Concern about the deterioration of the landscape” and we found that the Tree Ensemble Regression is the best predictor