COMM

Understanding censorship requires performing widespread, continuous measurements "on the ground". Yet, measuring censorship is potentially dangerous, due to the threat of retaliation against citizens who perform measurements. We must balance measurement ...

Existing research on Internet censorship primarily focuses on either measurements or circumvention. Considering these two in isolation often leads to designs with limited capabilities: Circumvention is not driven by measurement data and end users find ...

Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) is an important revenue source for online publishers and content providers. However, the extensive user tracking required to enable OBA raises valid privacy concerns. Existing and proposed solutions either block all ...

Online privacy is more important now than ever. Using encryption goes a long way by hiding application data from third parties, but some amount of private information is still exposed in packet headers. Tools like Tor are designed to address this ...

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) has quickly moved from the realm of hype to reality with estimates of over 25 billion devices deployed by 2020. While IoT has huge potential for societal impact, it comes with a number of key security challenges---IoT ...

Network failures are inevitable. Interfaces go down, devices crash and resources become exhausted. It is the responsibility of the control software to provide reliable services on top of unreliable components and throughout unpredictable events. ...

Network applications and protocols are increasingly adopting security and privacy features, as they are becoming one of the primary requirements. The wide-spread use of transport layer security (TLS) and the growing popularity of anonymity networks, ...

With the proliferation of smart wireless devices in our homes, the cross-technology interference increasingly becomes an important issue. This paper presents a novel smart relay system, called SpaceHub, which leverages an multi-antenna relay node to ...

This paper makes the case for "Room-Area Networks" (RAN), a new category that falls between personal area networks and local area networks. In a RAN, a set of nodes can hear each other only if they are in the same room, broadly construed as being within ...

Extensive standardization and R&D efforts are dedicated to establishing secure interdomain routing. These efforts focus on two complementary mechanisms: origin authentication with RPKI, and path validation with BGPsec. However, while RPKI is finally ...

Web content delivery is one of the most important services on the Internet. Access to websites is typically secured via TLS. However, this security model does not account for prefix hijacking on the network layer, which may lead to traffic blackholing ...

It is extremely difficult to deploy newinter-domain routing protocols in today's Internet. As a result, the Internet's baseline protocol for connectivity, BGP, has remained largely unchanged, despite known significant flaws. The difficulty of deploying ...

What determines the eventual success of a protocol? Are certain features or properties more important? Do those vary according to a protocol's type? We explore these questions by applying data mining techniques to a rich repository of protocol ...

As datacenter speeds scale to 100 Gb/s and beyond, traditional congestion control algorithms like TCP and RCP converge slowly to steady sending rates, which leads to poorer and less predictable user performance. These reactive algorithms use congestion ...

I think that I shall never see

a structure more wasteful than a tree.

Most links remain idle and unused

while others are overloaded and abused.

And with each failure comes disruption

caused by the ensuing tree construction.

Thus, L2 must discard its ...

Many architectures for high-performance datacenters have been proposed. Surprisingly, recent studies show that datacenter designs with random network topologies outperform more sophisticated designs, achieving near-optimal throughput and bisection ...

The trend towards simple data center network fabric strips most network functionality, including load balancing capabilities, out of the network core and pushes them to the edge. We investigate a different direction of incorporating minimal load ...

The performance of Internet services is intrinsically tied to propagation delays between end points (i.e., network latency). Standard active probe-based or passive host-based methods for measuring end-to-end latency are difficult to deploy at scale and ...

We make a case for judicious use of cloud infrastructure -- as an overlay to aid IP's best effort service. As an example, we propose ReWAN, a packet recovery service for real time, wide area communication. ReWAN uses cloud-based edge proxies that ...

With the advancement of multicore servers, there is a new trend of moving network functions to software servers. Measurement is critical to most network functions as it not only helps the operators understand the network usage and detect anomalies, but ...

Network management relies on an up-to-date and accurate view of many traffic metrics for tasks such as traffic engineering (e.g., heavy hitters), anomaly detection (e.g., entropy of source addresses), and security (e.g., DDoS detection). Obtaining an ...

Packet scheduling in switches is not programmable; operators only choose among a handful of scheduling algorithms implemented by the manufacturer. In contrast, other switch functions such as packet parsing and header processing are becoming programmable ...

In this paper we address a seemingly simple question: Is there a universal packet scheduling algorithm? More precisely, we analyze (both theoretically and empirically) whether there is a single packet scheduling algorithm that, at a network-wide level, ...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to diagnosing problems in complex networks. Our approach is based on the insight that many of the trickiest problems are anomalies -- they affect only a small fraction of the traffic (e.g., perhaps a certain ...

When debugging an SDN application, diagnosing the problem is merely the first step -- the operator must still implement a solution that works, and that does not cause new problems elsewhere. However, most existing SDN debuggers focus exclusively on ...