From One Edge to the Other:Exploring Gaming's Rising Presence on the Network

Audio and video streaming and on-demand services have dramatically changed how, and how much, media is consumed. Streaming generally allows a much larger selection of content, and arguably greater convenience. Gaming is the latest medium to place delivery of content into the cloud, via services such as Google Stadia and NVIDIA GeForce NOW. Just as with video streaming, this new ease comes with a hidden cost from the infrastructure used to deliver it, including the hardware cost, engineering cost and the energy to power the data centres and communications networks. Although gaming is currently only 7% of global network demand, with more than 95% of that being made up of downloading content, the possibility of streamed games could rapidly change this network footprint. In turn, this affects the yearly growth of energy impact from IT services. We explore possible futures where growth of these services continues, and we illustrate the implications a decade from now with three possible future scenarios for shifts of gaming practices. Our analyses show that game streaming will cause significant increases in the energy and carbon footprint of games

Citrus:Orchestrating Security Mechanisms via Adversarial Deception

Despite the Internet being an apex of human achievement for many years, sophisticated targeted attacks are becoming more prevalent than ever before. Large scale data collection using threat sources such as honeypots have recently been employed to gather information relating to these attacks. While this data naturally details attack properties, there exists challenges in extracting the relevant information from vast data sets to provide valuable insight and a standard description of the attack. Traditionally, threats are identified through the use of signatures that are crafted manually through the composition of IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) extracted from telemetry captured during an attack process, which is often administered by an experienced engineer. These signatures have been proven effective in their use by IDSs (Intrusion Detection Systems) to detect emerging threats. However, little research has been made in automating the extraction of emerging IOCs and the generation of corresponding signatures which incorporate host artefacts. In this paper we present Citrus: a novel approach to the generation of signatures by incorporating host based telemetry extracted from honeypot endpoints. Leveraging this visibility at an endpoint grants a detailed understanding of bleeding edge attack tactics, techniques, and procedures gathered from host logs

P4ID:P4 Enhanced Intrusion Detection

The growth in scale and capacity of networks in recent years leads to challenges of positioning and scalability of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). With the flexibility afforded by programmable dataplanes, it is now possible to perform a new level of intrusion detection in switches themselves. We present P4ID, combining a rule parser, stateless and stateful packet processing using P4, and evaluate it using publicly available datasets. We show that using this technique, we can achieve a significant reduction in traffic being processed by an IDS

Cache as a service:leveraging SDN to efficiently and transparently support Video-on-Demand on the last mile

High quality online video streaming, both live and on-demand, has become an essential part of consumers’ every-day lives. The popularity of video streaming as placed a heavy burden on the network infrastructure that now has to transfer an enormous amount of data very quickly to the end-user. To further exacerbate the situation, the Video-on-Demand (VoD) distribution paradigm uses a unicast independent flow for each user request. This results in multiple duplicate flows carrying the same video assets many times end-to-end. We present OpenCache: a highly configurable, efficient and transparent in-network caching service that aims to improve the VoD distribution efficiency by caching video assets as close to the end-user as possible. OpenCache leverages Software Defined Networking to benefit last mile environments by improving network utilisation and increasing the Quality of Experience for the end-user. Our evaluation on a pan-European OpenFlow testbed uses adaptive video streaming and demonstrates that with the use of OpenCache, the external link utilisation is reduced by 100%. Furthermore the streaming application receives better quality video and observes higher throughput, lower latency and shorter start up and buffering times

Development of Gold Nanoparticles for Photodynamic Therapy

The mechanistic properties determining whether gold nanoparticle mediated light therapy in human fibroblast cells (HeLa) takes place via a photothermal or photodynamic mechanism are investigated and discussed. The effect of cell size on AuNP uptake is shown, with smaller cells taking up less gold nanoparticles, this leads to a smaller photodynamic dose and lower efficacy of treatment. A new protocol for the investigation of photodynamic efficiency had to be developed for investigating isogenic cell lines UM-SCC-1, UM-SCC-1 pBABE and UM-SCC-1 p53 WT, which have high motility. This protocol was first tested against HeLa cells using citrate-gold nanoparticles, and similar results were obtained as with the original protocol. Due to the extremely low quantum yield for singlet oxygen photogeneration of citrate-gold nanoparticles they are difficult to apply in realistic conditions. Therefore, Gold nanoparticles were loaded with Rose Bengal via a polyelectrolyte layer-by-layer coating. These nanoparticles were characterised and applied as a photodynamic agent. Irradiation of HeLa cells containing these nanoparticles showed increased efficacy compared to citrate-gold nanoparticles, and the effect was successfully modelled to account for beam inhomogeneity, the heterogenous uptake of AuNPs and the photobleaching of Rose Bengal. Rose Bengal loaded gold nanoparticles showed killing in a realistic cell model UM-SCC-1, directly derived from Head-and-Neck cancer cells. When used against isogenic cells lines UM-SCC-1, UM-SCC-1 pBABE (both of which lack the p53 gene, an important regulator of cell metabolism and UM-SCC-1 p53 WT (where the p53 gene has been restored), cells with p53 function were significantly more affected by 1O2. This is consistent with expectations and with dye-mediated photodynamic therapy results reported in literature and confirms the importance of considering the loss of the p53 function which is often encountered in cancerous cells. However, it was also shown that the loss of the p53 function increases gold nanoparticle uptake, counterbalancing the detrimental effect on PDT efficiency

OpenCache:a content delivery platform for the modern internet

Since its inception, the World Wide Web has revolutionised the way we share information, keep in touch with each other and consume content. In the latter case, it is now used by thousands of simultaneous users to consume video, surpassing physical media as the primary means of distribution. With the rise of on-demand services and more recently, high-definition media, this popularity has not waned. To support this consumption, the underlying infrastructure has been forced to evolve at a rapid pace. This includes the technology and mechanisms to facilitate the transmission of video, which are now offered at varying levels of quality and resolution. Content delivery networks are often deployed in order to scale the distribution provision. These vary in nature and design; from third-party providers running entirely as a service to others, to in-house solutions owned by the content service providers themselves. However, recent innovations in networking and virtualisation, namely Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation, have paved the way for new content delivery infrastructure designs. In this thesis, we discuss the motivation behind OpenCache, a next-generation content delivery platform. We examine how we can leverage these emerging technologies to provide a more flexible and scalable solution to content delivery. This includes analysing the feasibility of novel redirection techniques, and how these compare to existing means. We also investigate the creation of a unified interface from which a platform can be precisely controlled, allowing new applications to be created that operate in harmony with the infrastructure provision. Developments in distributed virtualisation platforms also enables functionality to be spread throughout a network, influencing the design of OpenCache. Through a prototype implementation, we evaluate each of these facets in a number of different scenarios, made possible through deployment on large-scale testbeds

MA in Community Development: Recommendations for the University of Victoria

This project report describes research conducted on behalf of the BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA) and the University of Victoria. The project gathered information about the educational needs of people working in the social economy with a view to providing research input into the development of a BALTA supported initiative to develop a new MA program in community development which is now being offered by the University of Victoria.BC-Alberta Social Economy Research Alliance (BALTA) ; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) ; University of Victori