Chapter 8 - IRC and Botnets

This paper presents a new distributed computing framework for Many Task Computing (MTC) applications, based on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). A lightweight, highly available system, named Kestrel, has been developed to explore XMPP-based techniques for improving MTC system tolerance to faults that result from scaling and intermittent computing agent presence. By leveraging technologies used in large instant messaging systems that scale to millions of clients, this MTC system is designed to scale to millions of agents at various levels of granularity: cores, machines, clusters, and even sensors, which makes it a good fit for MTC.Kestrel's architecture is inspired by the distributed design of pilot job frameworks on the grid as well as botnets, with the addition of a commodity instant messaging protocol for communications. Whereas botnet command-and-control systems have frequently used a combination of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Distributed Hash Table (DHT), and other Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies, Kestrel utilizes XMPP for its presence notification capabilities, which allow the system to maintain continuous tracking of machine presence and state in real time. XMPP is also easily extensible with application-specific subprotocols, which can be utilized to transfer machine profile descriptions and job requirements. These sub-protocols can be used to implement distributed matching of jobs to systems, using a mechanism similar to ClassAds in the Condor High Throughput Computing (HTC) system.

How Bizarre: The Glitch of the Nineties as a Fantasy of New Authorship

IP hosts and network infrastructure have historically been difficult to configure, but emerging networking protocols promise to enable hosts to establish IP networks without prior configuration or network services. Even very simple devices with few computing resources will be able to communicate via standard protocols wherever they are attached. Current IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standardization efforts, such as those in the Zeroconf Working Group, aim to make this form of networking simple and inexpensive. In this tutorial, I examine the background, current status and future prospects for zero-configuration networking.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

Neighbor Discovery (ND) protocol has been proposed to discover neighboring hosts and routers in IPv6 wired or wireless local networks. Even though ND protocol is very useful, it has a weakness to security because it allows a malicious user to impersonate a legitimate host or a router by forging ND protocol messages. To address the security problem, IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has proposed SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND) protocol. The key functions of SEND protocol include address ownership proof mechanism, ND protocol message protection mechanism, reply attack prevention mechanism, and router authentication mechanism. In this paper, we analyze SEND protocol in the view point of security through several experiments. For this, we implement SEND protocol in IPv6 real system and develop a simulation environment. Based on the experimental results, we also propose a monitoring-based ND message differentiation scheme which is able to make up for security vulnerability of SEND protocol effectively.

This paper introduces a new model dedicated to the Internet of Thing that interacts with active RFIDs. Instead of targeting IP stacks implementation in tags, we plan to support the Host Identity Protocol, which dissociates IP address and host location and that has been recently defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We propose an architecture, in which a PORTAL entity realizes the bridge between classical IP world (compatible with the EPCglobal infrastructure) and HIP domains, dealing with a constellation of readers and tags.

This paper describes an automatic and robust approach to generate quality triangular meshes for complicated domains with topology ambiguity. In previous works, we developed an octree-based Dual Contouring (DC) method to construct triangular meshes for complicated domains. However, topology ambiguity exists and causes non-conformal meshes. In this study, we discuss all possible topology configurations and develop an extension of DC which guarantees the correct topology. We first generate one base mesh with the previous DC method. Then we analyze all the octree leaf cells and categorize them into 31 topology groups. In order to discriminate these cells, we compute the values of their face and body saddle points based on a tri-linear representation inside the cells. Knowing the correct categorization, we are able to modify the base mesh and introduce more minimizer points within the same cell. With these minimizer points we update the mesh connectivities to preserve the correct topology. Finally we use a Laplacian smoothing technique to improve the mesh quality. Our main contribution is the topology categorization and mesh modification. We have applied our algorithm to three complicated domains and obtained good results.

The distribution of copyright content over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks facilitates misuse of protected digital property and severely violates the rights of creators and owners. Besides, the anonymity and other features of latest P2P applications make law enforcement almost impractical. Unfortunately, current technology efforts attempting to block unauthorized files depend on manually predefined keywords which can be easily modified by the application, and they fail to distinguish between authorized and unauthorized files. In this context, we present PIFF, an intelligent file filtering mechanism for peer-to-peer network, which effectively blocks illegal file distribution based on file signatures automatically generated and deployed by the system. With a hierarchy infrastructure and decision algorithm, our solution discovers and identifies the file signatures much faster than manual analysis, and spreads it among system nodes to perform filtering immediately. Experiment results suggest that compared with unprotected environment, PIFF can reduce over 85% peers for unauthorized files without any affect on the distribution of authorized files.