80 research outputs found
Relaxing state-access constraints in stateful programmable data planes
Supporting the programming of stateful packet forwarding functions in
hardware has recently attracted the interest of the research community. When
designing such switching chips, the challenge is to guarantee the ability to
program functions that can read and modify data plane's state, while keeping
line rate performance and state consistency. Current state-of-the-art designs
are based on a very conservative all-or-nothing model: programmability is
limited only to those functions that are guaranteed to sustain line rate, with
any traffic workload. In effect, this limits the maximum time to execute state
update operations. In this paper, we explore possible options to relax these
constraints by using simulations on real traffic traces. We then propose a
model in which functions can be executed in a larger but bounded time, while
preventing data hazards with memory locking. We present results showing that
such flexibility can be supported with little or no throughput degradation.Comment: 6 page
Re-designing Dynamic Content Delivery in the Light of a Virtualized Infrastructure
We explore the opportunities and design options enabled by novel SDN and NFV
technologies, by re-designing a dynamic Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.
Our system, named MOSTO, provides performance levels comparable to that of a
regular CDN, but does not require the deployment of a large distributed
infrastructure. In the process of designing the system, we identify relevant
functions that could be integrated in the future Internet infrastructure. Such
functions greatly simplify the design and effectiveness of services such as
MOSTO. We demonstrate our system using a mixture of simulation, emulation,
testbed experiments and by realizing a proof-of-concept deployment in a
planet-wide commercial cloud system.Comment: Extended version of the paper accepted for publication in JSAC
special issue on Emerging Technologies in Software-Driven Communication -
November 201
Time for aCTIon: Automated Analysis of Cyber Threat Intelligence in the Wild
Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) plays a crucial role in assessing risks and
enhancing security for organizations. However, the process of extracting
relevant information from unstructured text sources can be expensive and
time-consuming. Our empirical experience shows that existing tools for
automated structured CTI extraction have performance limitations. Furthermore,
the community lacks a common benchmark to quantitatively assess their
performance. We fill these gaps providing a new large open benchmark dataset
and aCTIon, a structured CTI information extraction tool. The dataset includes
204 real-world publicly available reports and their corresponding structured
CTI information in STIX format. Our team curated the dataset involving three
independent groups of CTI analysts working over the course of several months.
To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is two orders of magnitude larger
than previously released open source datasets. We then design aCTIon,
leveraging recently introduced large language models (GPT3.5) in the context of
two custom information extraction pipelines. We compare our method with 10
solutions presented in previous work, for which we develop our own
implementations when open-source implementations were lacking. Our results show
that aCTIon outperforms previous work for structured CTI extraction with an
improvement of the F1-score from 10%points to 50%points across all tasks
Hybrid Hemp Particles as Functional Fillers for the Manufacturing of Hydrophobic and Anti-icing Epoxy Composite Coatings
The development of hydrophobic composite coatings is of great interest for several applications in the aerospace industry. Functionalized microparticles can be obtained from waste fabrics and employed as fillers to prepare sustainable hydrophobic epoxy-based coatings. Following a waste-to-wealth approach, a novel hydrophobic epoxy-based composite including hemp microparticles (HMPs) functionalized with waterglass solution, 3-aminopropyl triethoxysilane, polypropylene-graft-maleic anhydride, and either hexadecyltrimethoxysilane or 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane is presented. The resulting epoxy coatings based on hydrophobic HMPs were cast on aeronautical carbon fiber-reinforced panels to improve their anti-icing performance. Wettability and anti-icing behavior of the prepared composites were investigated at 25 °C and −30 °C (complete icing time), respectively. Samples cast with the composite coating can achieve up to 30 °C higher water contact angle and doubled icing time than aeronautical panels treated with unfilled epoxy resin. A low content (2 wt %) of tailored HMPs causes an increase of ∼26% in the glass transition temperature of the coatings compared to pristine resin, confirming the good interaction between the hemp filler and epoxy matrix at the interphase. Finally, atomic force microscopy reveals that the HMPs can induce the formation of a hierarchical structure on the surface of casted panels. This rough morphology, combined with the silane activity, allows the preparation of aeronautical substrates with enhanced hydrophobicity, anti-icing capability, and thermal stability
Flexible Traffic Management in Broadband Access Networks using Software Defined Networking
Abstract-Over the years, the demand for high bandwidth services, such as live and on-demand video streaming, steadily increased. The adequate provisioning of such services is challenging and requires complex network management mechanisms to be implemented by Internet service providers (ISPs). In current broadband network architectures, the traffic of subscribers is tunneled through a single aggregation point, independent of the different service types it belongs to. While having a single aggregation point eases the management of subscribers for the ISP, it implies huge bandwidth requirements for the aggregation point and potentially high end-to-end latency for subscribers. An alternative would be a distributed subscriber management, adding more complexity to the management itself. In this paper, a new traffic management architecture is proposed that uses the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to extend the existing Ethernet-based broadband network architecture, enabling a more efficient traffic management for an ISP. By using SDN-enabled home gateways, the ISP can configure traffic flows more dynamically, optimizing throughput in the network, especially for bandwidth-intensive services. Furthermore, a proofof-concept implementation of the approach is presented to show the general feasibility and study configuration tradeoffs. Analytic considerations and testbed measurements show that the approach scales well with an increasing number of subscriber sessions
A unifying operating platform for 5G end-to-end and multi-layer orchestration
Heterogeneity of current software solutions for 5G is heading for complex and costly situations, with high fragmentation, which in turn creates uncertainty and the risk of delaying 5G innovations. This context motivated the definition of a novel Operating Platform for 5G (5G-OP), a unifying reference functional framework supporting end-to-end and multi-layer orchestration. 5G-OP aims at integrated management, control and orchestration of computing, storage, memory, networking core and edge resources up to the end-user devices and terminals (e.g., robots and smart vehicles). 5G-OP is an overarching architecture, with agnostic interfaces and well-defined abstractions, offering the seamless integration of current and future infrastructure control and orchestration solutions (e.g., OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenStack, Apache Mesos, OpenSource MANO, Docker, LXC, etc.) The paper provides also the description of a prototype that can be seen as a simplified version of a 5G-OP, whose feasibility has been demonstrated in Focus Group IMT2020 of ITU-T
Aneurysmal subarachnoid haemorrhage in pregnancy: a case series
Pregnancy is a recognized risk factor for aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH). Headache is very frequent in normal pregnancy and it is a common sign shared between several intracranial diseases. We present a case series of 10 women in the third trimester of pregnancy admitted to our intensive care unit (ICU) with neurological signs and symptoms. 4 of these patients were diagnosed with SAH. Data in this study suggest that a timely diagnosis and an appropriate treatment is crucial for mother and baby
PALANTIR demo: leveraging SecaaS model for managing threats in industrial environments
PALANTIR, an EU-funded Innovation Action project, delivers tailored and pervasive resource protection through the Security-as-a-Service paradigm. This demo presents the architecture and validates the prototype against three threat scenarios with botnet, data breach and tampering attacks
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