IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium
20-24 April 2020 // Budapest, Hungary
Management in the Age of Softwarization and Artificial Intelligence

Tutorials

All times listed are in Central European Summer Time (CEST)

Monday, 20 April 2020

9:00-12:30

T2: Edge/Fog Computing and Networking: Architecture, Management, and Security

Hung-Yu Wei

Abstract: The IoT and other paradigms (e.g., “5G and Beyond” Wireless) depend upon low latency interaction between devices at the network edge and the cloud at centralized data centers. However, the potentially huge amount of data resulting from edge devices may make it impractical to directly communicate with the cloud. To significantly expand the usefulness of IoT and other demanding applications, the Fog/Edge paradigm provides the intermediate computing, communications, storage and processing capabilities needed between the cloud and its edge devices, i.e., Fog/Edge bridges the "Cloud-to-Thing" continuum. Highlighting the importance to industry, this tutorial will cover the following topics:

  • Introduction and background on basic edge/fog principles, including relationship to edge and cloud computing
  • Use cases where edge/fog is needed for desired functionalities and performance, e.g., autonomous cars, energy management, robotics, industrial IoT
  • Fog and edge reference architectures and road maps
  • Key organizations or consortia working on implementation agreements and standards for both fog and edge computing
  • Published and draft standards (e.g. IEEE P1934, IIC/OpenFog, ETSI MEC)
  • Management and orchestration of edge/fog systems
  • Security and trust in edge/fog systems

Biography:

Hung-Yu Wei is a Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering and Graduate Institute of Communications Engineering, National Taiwan University. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1999. He received the M.S. and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 2001 and 2005 respectively. He was a summer intern at Telcordia Applied Research in 2000 and 2001. He was with NEC Labs America from 2003 to 2005. He joined Department of Electrical Engineering at the National Taiwan University in July 2005. His research interests include next-generation wireless broadband networks, mobility management in mobile Internet, IoT, vehicular networking, fog computing, cross-layer design and optimization in wireless multimedia communications, and game theoretical models for communications networks. He received NTU Excellent Teaching Award in 2008 and 2018. He also received "Recruiting Outstanding Young Scholar Award" from the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship in 2006, K. T. Li Young Researcher Award from ACM Taipei/Taiwan Chapter and The Institute of Information and Computing Machinery in 2012, Ministry of Science and Technology Research Project for Excellent Young Scholars in 2014, Excellent Young Engineer Award from the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering in 2014, and Wu Ta You Memorial Award from MOST in 2015. He was a consulting member of Acts and Regulation Committee of National Communications Commission during 2008~2009. He served as a division director in NTU Computer and Information Networking Center during 2016-2017.He has been actively participating in NGMN, IEEE 802.16, 3GPP, IEEE P1934 standardization, and was a voting member of the IEEE 802.16 working group. He serves as Vice Chair of IEEE P1934 Working Group to standardize fog computing and networking architecture. He also serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE IoT journal. He is an IEEE certified Wireless Communications Professional. He was the Chair of IEEE VTS Taipei Chapter during 2016~2017. He is currently the Chair of IEEE P1935 working group for edge/fog management and orchestration. He serves as Secretary for IEEE ComSoc Fog/Edge Industry Community.

 

13:30-17:00

T1:  Blockchains in the Age of Softwarization – Hands-on Experiences with Programming Smart Contracts and Their Security Pitfalls

Bruno Rodrigues, Eder Scheid, Burkhard Stiller

Abstract: The age of Softwarization is characterized as an era in which telecommunication providers, hardware vendors, and software companies seek for an increasing product functionality while coping with the optimization of related hardware-software interactions. Thus, the decentralization of certain information elements, as well as an integration of potentially non-trusted stakeholders provides a dedicated path to follow, while exploiting the characteristics of decentralized Blockchains (BC). Thus, BCs themselves and Smart Contracts (SC) – the central element of BC-based applications, here for implementing information management logics within an (a) application domain, (b) a network management domain, or (c) a system’s security domain – offer a transparent and immutable platform within a fully softwarized setting. However, since a variety of different notions of a BC exist, the real and public BC vs. the private BC – better termed to be a Distributed Ledger (DL) – all these are based on very different trust assumptions. Thus, application-specific requirements will lead to preferring one technical solution over the other. Nevertheless of this BC type to be differentiated, the language and compilers – on which SCs rely on – are still in their infancy compared to highly consolidated programming languages, such as C or Java. Thus, the SC security becomes a vital element for all actors interacting with BC-based applications, both (a) from the viewpoint of platform-relevant blockchain vulnerabilities and (b) the application logic itself, which that can be exploited by malicious users. Thus, this tutorial is based specifically on the Ethereum platform and Solidity contracts, to demonstrate theoretically and practically main common vulnerabilities and SC development mistakes. In this regard, the course provides a theoretical basis at first in which key BC and SC elements are introduced, as well as key vulnerabilities are explained. Following, the course provides – based on a cluster of 20 Raspberry Pi devices – the experimental environment so the attendees can practically analyze a selection of these vulnerabilities in a permissioned blockchain with nodes accessible from a browser. Thus, the practical part only requires the audience to work on its own laptop with a standard browser to connect to the cluster and execute the respective tutorial commands and perform the guided exercises. Subsequently to completing those, the tutorial concludes by highlighting the development principles for SCs in order to avoid common mistakes and unacceptable trends in SC development.

Biographies:

Bruno Rodrigues is a Junior Researcher currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at the University of Zurich UZH under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller. He received his s M.Sc. from the Polytechnic School of University of São Paulo in 2016, where he was Teaching Assistant (TA) of the under graduate “Introduction to Computer Networks” course and an instructor of “Practical Introductory SDN” courses. At the UZH, Bruno is TA of the “Communication Systems Laboratory” and participates as an instructor in the Swiss “Certificate for Advanced Studies (CAS) on Blockchains” and “CAS on Big Data and Machine Learning” focusing on blockchains in general and practical hands-on on Blockchains, Smart Contracts, and Clouds.

Eder Scheid is a Junior Researcher pursuing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller at the University of Zurich UZH. He is also a teaching assistant at the Communication Systems Group CSG since December 2017. Eder holds an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of the Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), which he obtained in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville. His master's thesis was entitled “INSpIRE: an Integrated NFV-baSed. Intent Refinement Environment”. Eder is one of the teaching assistants of the “Blockchains and Overlay Networks” class for M.Sc. students at UZH. Also, in 2018 and 2019 he served as an instructor on the “Certificate for Advanced Studies (CAS) on Blockchains” class and the “CAS on Big Data and Machine Learning” focusing on blockchains in general and practical hands-on on Blockchains, Smart Contracts, and Clouds.

Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller received the Informatik-Diplom (M.Sc.) degree in Computer Science and the Dr. rer.-nat. (Ph.D.) degree from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. In his research career he was with the Computer Lab, University of Cambridge, U.K (1994-1995), ETH Zürich, Switzerland (1995-2004), and the University of Federal Armed Forces Munich, Germany (2002-2004). Since 2004 he chairs the Communication Systems Group CSG, Department of Informatics IfI, University of Zürich UZH, Switzerland. Besides being a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, Springer’s Journal of Network and Systems Management, and the KICS’ Journal of Communications and Networks, Burkhard is as well Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Computer Networks journal. His main research interests are published in well over 300 research papers and include systems with a fully decentralized control (blockchains, clouds, peer-to-peer), network and service management (economic management), Internet-of-Things (security of constrained devices, LoRa), and telecommunication economics (charging and accounting).


Friday, 24 April 2020

13:30-17:00

T3: Reliable measurements with BGP and RPKI

Mattijs Jonker, Nils Rodday

Abstract: The proposed tutorial will be an in-depth hands-on tutorial that is going to cover state-of-the-art Internet measurement and analysis techniques for BGP and RPKI. In terms of data, we will jointly analyze (public) BGP data and other Internet measurement data such as DNS and geolocation data. For our analyses, we will use tools such as CAIDA’s BGPStream and Apache Spark. We will focus on recent research that is improving the identification of Route Origin Validation (ROV) enforcing Autonomous Systems and the participants will learn how to use BGPStream towards the same goal.

BGP measurements continue to be a crucial area of research within the measurement community as BGP Hijacks as well as Route Leaks are increasing. One of the solutions, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), is actively deployed by operators to thwart such dangers. It provides a mechanism to cryptographically bind an AS number to a prefix, allowing every AS on the Internet to check whether the origin of that prefix is indeed allowed to announce it. An easy way to measure RPKI adoption is to look at Route Origin Authorization (ROA) objects that are being published for the announced BGP prefixes. However, this does not display the actual adoption of Autonomous Systems using RPKI to actively filter invalid routes. We will therefore also look at how ROV-enforcing Autonomous Systems can be measured. This involves controlled experiments using the PEERING testbed and a certificate authority to sign ROAs.

Participants will learn how to process readily available public BGP data using BGPStream, which biases and pitfalls to watch out for when analysing BGP data, and how the RPKI helps in fighting BGP hijacking and route leaks. The tutorial will mostly be a hands-on tutorial in order to maximize the takeaway for the participants.

The tutorial is split in two parts. Both topics are going to be introduced in a short, classical lecture format in the beginning. Afterwards there is going to be a hands-on session for the participants for each block. One virtual machine per person will be provided in the beginning of the course to be run on the workstations of the participants. As data consumption for BGP measurements can be quite challenging for the network, we will be working with prefetched data that participants can read from their BGPStream interface, effectively mimicking an online behaviour.

Biographies:

Mattijs Jonker earned his PhD cum laude at the University of Twente, where he is now a postdoc. He has successfully used tools such as BGPstream and Spark for his measurement-based research efforts, which resulted in various IMC papers over the past years. Mattijs also works on the award-winning OpenINTEL project, which measures 65% of the global DNS namespace on a daily basis. OpenINTEL provided data has enabled many successful research efforts for the betterment of the Internet.

Nils Rodday is currently a PhD student at the Bundeswehr University Munich and the University of Twente after returning from the industry where he has been working as an IT-Security Consultant for IBM Security. He has taught several classes throughout the past years, including Introduction to Networking in fall 2017/2018/2019, Advanced Networking in spring 2018, and Cyber-Security in spring 2019. Moreover, he has been speaker at several scientific as well as industry related conferences (BlackHat / RSA Conference).