Diversity in Uniform: An Approach To Teaching Introductory Information Technology

In a school where every single student dresses exactly the same as every other student every day, often called the “sea of gray”, where each person learns to sit, stand and walk exactly the same way and each will participate in the same summer jobs, and where all graduates will be hired to work by the same organization in essentially the same job, diversity couldn\u27t be an issue, could it? When every student in each incoming class receives exactly the same computer system and takes exactly the same introductory technology course, Information Technology education is anything but diverse, or is it? While the students, called cadets, all dress exactly the same, they offer a wonderfully rich and diverse population, both in their culture and in their familiarity with and knowledge of information systems

Packet Aggregation for Wireless LAN

This research considered the efficient transmission of data within a wireless local area network (WLAN) system. A simulation model was developed to study the performance of our protocol, AGG-MAC (aggregated medium access control). AGG-MAC is a simple and elegant medium access control (MAC) protocol designed to improve performance by transmitting a maximal quantity of data with minimal overhead. Our enhancement to IEEE 802.11, AGG-MAC yields dramatic improvements in both local and global throughput. It furthermore reduces jitter in support of real time communications requirements such as voice over IP (VoIP). In support of heterogeneous roaming between Third Generation (3G) Wideband CDMA (WCDMA), specifically Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and WLAN systems, we constructed a simulation environment which allowed the evaluation of AGG-MAC in such a system. We further demonstrated the suitability of AGG-MAC throughout a range of infrastructure and ad hoc based WLAN scenarios. The AGG-MAC protocol enhancement provides significant performance improvements across a range of wireless applications, while interoperating with standard IEEE 802.11 stations. Performance is commensurate to original WLAN MAC performance for applications that do not benefit frompacketlevelaggregation. The key contributions of this research were two-fold. First was the development of an OPNET TM simulation environment suitable for evaluation of future protocols supporting tightly coupled, heterogeneous WLAN and 3G systems. Secondly was the implementation and testing of the AGG-MAC protocol which aggregates suboptimal size packets together into a single frame, thereby amortizing the overhead

Strengthening MT6D Defenses with LXC-Based Honeypot Capabilities

Moving Target IPv6 Defense (MT6D) imparts radio-frequency hopping behavior to IPv6 networks by having participating nodes periodically hop onto new addresses while giving up old addresses. Our previous research efforts implemented a solution to identify and acquire these old addresses that are being discarded by MT6D hosts on a local network besides being able to monitor and visualize the incoming traffic on these addresses. This was essentially equivalent to forming a darknet out of the discarded MT6D addresses, but the solution presented in the previous research effort did not include database integration for it to scale and be extended. This paper presents a solution with a new architecture that not only extends the previous solution in terms of automation and database integration but also demonstrates the ability to deploy a honeypot on a virtual LXC (Linux Container) on-demand based on any interesting traffic pattern observed on a discarded address. The proposed architecture also allows an MT6D host to query the solution database for network activity on its relinquished addresses as a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) object. This allows an MT6D host to identify suspicious activity on its discarded addresses and strengthen the MT6D scheme parameters accordingly. We have built a proof-of-concept for the proposed solution and analyzed the solution’s feasibility and scalability