Title: An Empirical Study of Campus-Level Instagram Traffic
Time: 13:00
Location: Meeting Room B, Building Zeta
Speaker: Carey Lee Williamson
Abstract: Instagram is a popular network application for photo sharing, video streaming, and online social media interaction. This talk presents results from an empirical study of Instagram network traffic, as viewed from a large campus edge network. Despite the challenges of NAT, DHCP, end-to-end encryption, and high traffic volume, we are able to identify key characteristics of Instagram traffic, which exceeds 1 TB per day. The main highlights from our study include classic observations such as diurnal usage patterns, Zipf-like distributions for IP frequency-rank profile, and heavy-tailed transfer size distributions. Several new observations include anomalous spikes in Instagram traffic, some network policies that inhibit Instagram usage, and some small differences in Instagram usage between campus-based users and the general public.
Tag Archives: Communication Networks
24/01/2014 – Talk by Mauro Conti
Title: Future Internet Security and Privacy (challenges)
Time: 14:00
Location: Meeting room
Type: Research Result
Speaker: Mauro conti
Abstract:
The Internet is an amazing success story, connecting hundreds of millions of users. However, in the last decade, there has been a growing realization that the current Internet Protocol is reaching the limits of its senescence. In fact, the way people access and utilize it has changed radically since the 1970-s when its architecture was conceived.
This has prompted several research efforts that aim to design potential next-generation Internet architectures. In particular, Content-Centric Networking (CCN) is an emerging networking paradigm being considered as a possible replacement for the current IP-based host-centric Internet infrastructure. CCN focuses on content distribution, which is arguably not well served by IP. Named-Data Networking (NDN) is an example of CCN.
NDN is also an active research project under the NSF Future Internet Architectures (FIA) program. FIA emphasizes security and privacy from the outset and by design. To be a viable Internet architecture, NDN must be resilient against current and emerging threats.
In this talk, we highlight the main security and privacy issues we identified in NDN. Then, as a representative case, we discuss interest flooding, a possible denial-of-service attack that exploits key architectural features of NDN. We show that an adversary with limited resources can implement such attack, having a significant impact on network performance. We then introduce Poseidon: a framework for detecting and mitigating interest flooding attacks. Finally, we report on results of extensive simulations assessing proposed countermeasure.
