Characterizing Scanning Behavior

Last week, Tom Dooner and Brian Stack, two undergraduates we're working with at Case Western Reserve University, presented a poster at Case's Intersections: SOURCE Undergraduate Symposium and Poster Session. The work presented is a preliminary characterization of scanning patterns as observed over 12+ years at LBNL. You can view the poster here.

Followup: Tom and Brian's poster won second place among posters from the College of Engineering at this event. Congrats!

IMC'10 Paper on Illuminating Edge Networks

Earlier this month we presented the ICSI Netalyzr at the Internet Measurement Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The Netalyzr is a public edge network measurement and debugging service that evaluates the functionality provided by people's Internet connectivity. Its tests include outbound port filtering, hidden in-network HTTP caches, DNS manipulations, NAT behavior, path MTU issues, access-modem buffer capacity, and growing IPv6 support and performance. The paper is available here:

• Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver, Boris Nechaev, and Vern Paxson. Netalyzr: Illuminating The Edge Network. Internet Measurement Conference, 2010, Melbourne, Australia. (bib)

The Netalyzr has been one of our major research efforts over the past two years, and we're thrilled by the popularity it has gained since we launched it—to date, Netalyzr has collected 160,000 sessions from 6,800 different organisations in 190 countries: The study is ongoing, so visit the Netalyzr website and run it yourself!

Paper on Emergency Notification

We recently published a paper that discusses a special-purpose social network for communicating during an wide-scale emergency situation (e.g., an earthquake).

• Mark Allman. On Building Special-Purpose Social Networks for Emergency Communication. ACM Computer Communication Review, 40(5), October 2010.

The CCR public review of the paper is also available here.

Dealing with Tussle

At HotNets this week Aditya Akella presented our joint paper outlining an architectural framework for dealing with the tussle that naturally arise between networks that want to control resources and enforce policies, on the one hand, and users who are trying to accomplish some work, on the other. The paper is:

• Chitra Muthukrishnan, Vern Paxson, Mark Allman, Aditya Akella. Using Strongly Typed Networking to Architect for Tussle. ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), October 2010.

While many of the details of a practical implementation would need to be worked out we'd appreciate feedback on this thought experiment.

Postdoctoral Fellowship Opening

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) invites applications for a Postdoctoral Fellow position in the area of applying modern compiler technology to the domain of high-performance network security monitoring.

The Fellow will be working with ICSI's Networking Group on designing, implementing, and evaluating novel approaches for efficient monitoring of large-scale network environments. The position's primary research focus is on developing strategies for compiling high-level analysis descriptions into highly optimized code for execution on current multi-core architectures.

Please see the full posting for more information.

Major NSF Funding for Bro Development

The Bro team is jazzed to announce that the National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of almost $3M to the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for extensive Bro development.

The funded project aims specifically at addressing much of the feedback that we have received from Bro users over the years. It will enable us to refine many of the rough edges that the system has accumulated over time[*], improve Bro's performance significantly, and also make it much easier for the community to contribute to the project.

For further information, see the joint ICSI/NCSA press release.

Thanks to everybody who helped make this happen!

[*] Yes, that includes documentation!

Cybercasing the Joint

Earlier this month, we presented a paper on how geotagging can leave users vulnerable to what we termed "cybercasing":

Gerald Friedland, Robin Sommer
Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geo-Tagging
Proc. USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security, 2010

This work was featured by the New York Times, ABC News, Toronto Star, and New Scientist.