Well, the holidays have certainly made things difficult to keep things updated as regularly as I was hoping. Toss in a family emergency to a tight schedule and all bets are off.
A few quick notes for those that do peruse this:
- The INFOCOM 2008 is now on-line and it is a monster. The inclusion of the mini-conference on the main list kept me busy noting relevant papers for my students to look at. Multicast and classical QoS (that isn't pure theory) outside of wireless are definitely minor niche research areas now. I'll certainly be out at Phoenix for the conference despite not having a paper in the main conference (sigh, yet again). Amusingly enough, we have a very good chance (nearly finalized) of getting Cisco funding for our work that was rejected so I guess I'll take money over a publication.
- NDSI 08 results are also out. By in large the reviews were very thorough (a nice trait of the USENIX arena of conferences) but a near miss for us on our Lockdown work. Unfortunately, a single reviewer whose criticisms and ratings were out of sync with the rest of the reviews pretty much doomed the paper. We certainly made the discussion phase but with only 30 out of 175 papers making it in, a killer review like that is too hard to overcome. Eh, not much one can in those cases but grin and bear it and simply note to the students that it indeed happens to everyone in the field.
Long story short, we targeted ease of use and intuitiveness (i.e. just make it work) and the reviewer wanted novelty and complexity (i.e. simplicity is bad). Certainly fair for a conference like Security and Privacy but I thought a bit too pointed for the systems-oriented nature of NSDI. Interestingly enough, a core argument in the paper is that a huge problem in security is that we are making these wonderful complex systems that are hard to use and they aren't being used because well .... they are hard to use. It makes me wonder if Ethernet were proposed today (work with me here) would ever have a chance at a major conference or grant review panel. I certainly have some strong opinions on how the networking conference track is going the wrong direction (too much gatekeeping, not enough prospecting) but that is a post for a different day (post tenure of course). Let's just say I no longer frown upon abstract only submissions like I used to that other areas of CS heavily use. If I have time, I'll post the reviews on-line with the comment/response notes that we did for the HotNets paper which I think was a good exercise.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Weekly papers - back again
Finally, back with the weekly papers segment after a rough beginning of November. Perhaps it was dodging reactions from INFOCOM reviews and how it went with various folks. More on that later when I have time to do a length post.
Diversity and multiplexing: a fundamental tradeoff in multiple-antenna channels This paper comes from our weekly papers meeting two weeks ago from discussions regarding our INFOCOM reviews regarding the relevance of MIMO to our current work. Transactions on Information Theory is a bit out of our normal purview so kudos to Dave for taking the time to digest the paper in its entirety.
The paper looked at the tradeoffs in a multi-antenna environment with regards to reliability versus capacity. The most relevant portion of the paper is the strong dropoff with regards to either dimension, i.e. if you choose to do both, you will not get a solution that is strong in either dimension. Not exactly a shocking result but the work in the paper is quite sound and a nice discussion point to discuss why our current work on wireless reliability is very interesting.
Near as I can tell, industry has gone the route of capacity over reliability meaning that our results regarding channel reliability are especially apt. In short, our most recent work has been looking at if the reliability of the channel for nodes in close proximity. If loss is primarily from the medium, losses should be correlated in nearby spaces but not necessarily correlated across larger spaces. In contrast, if losses are not correlated in a tight area, it means that it is likely an individual device going crazy, not the medium itself. Most of the works in the literature regarding burstiness / etc. seem to trust that the device itself is good and that the packet got corrupted before arriving, not that the device itself may be a significant source of the packet errors.
While previous works such as SRD by Balakrishnan reached what would be a similar conclusion, the works reached their conclusion for quite different reasons. Put simply, the physical sensors were highly scattered (i.e. APs over 30 feet+ apart) allowing for multi-path effects for different loss probabilities. In contrast, we showed that losses tended to also show a lack of correlation in short distances regardless of orientation, small distance between, and heavy background traffic. Moreover, there were also "weird" periodicity aspects to some of the devices that bear further investigation (Intel Centrino chipset).
Diversity and multiplexing: a fundamental tradeoff in multiple-antenna channels This paper comes from our weekly papers meeting two weeks ago from discussions regarding our INFOCOM reviews regarding the relevance of MIMO to our current work. Transactions on Information Theory is a bit out of our normal purview so kudos to Dave for taking the time to digest the paper in its entirety.
The paper looked at the tradeoffs in a multi-antenna environment with regards to reliability versus capacity. The most relevant portion of the paper is the strong dropoff with regards to either dimension, i.e. if you choose to do both, you will not get a solution that is strong in either dimension. Not exactly a shocking result but the work in the paper is quite sound and a nice discussion point to discuss why our current work on wireless reliability is very interesting.
Near as I can tell, industry has gone the route of capacity over reliability meaning that our results regarding channel reliability are especially apt. In short, our most recent work has been looking at if the reliability of the channel for nodes in close proximity. If loss is primarily from the medium, losses should be correlated in nearby spaces but not necessarily correlated across larger spaces. In contrast, if losses are not correlated in a tight area, it means that it is likely an individual device going crazy, not the medium itself. Most of the works in the literature regarding burstiness / etc. seem to trust that the device itself is good and that the packet got corrupted before arriving, not that the device itself may be a significant source of the packet errors.
While previous works such as SRD by Balakrishnan reached what would be a similar conclusion, the works reached their conclusion for quite different reasons. Put simply, the physical sensors were highly scattered (i.e. APs over 30 feet+ apart) allowing for multi-path effects for different loss probabilities. In contrast, we showed that losses tended to also show a lack of correlation in short distances regardless of orientation, small distance between, and heavy background traffic. Moreover, there were also "weird" periodicity aspects to some of the devices that bear further investigation (Intel Centrino chipset).
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
New hardware toys
Over the past month or so, I have been searching for low-cost prototype boards for exploring our RIPPS and ScaleBox work. I think I finally have a winner to play with for the near term with the Atmel NGW 100 Network Gateway kit. It has native dual Ethernet support to allow me to do pass through operations with a customized version of Linux already running. A host of other options less important for networking but very cool for tinkering (SD slot, USB, I2C, SPI, GPIO). Most important of all, the price is just about perfect at only $89. For a few more dollars, it would have been nice to see a power supply tossed in but I already had a few 12V supplies lying around from our my mass of external drive purchases in January.
The board is quite fascinating both as an implementation platform and potentially as a teaching platform. At sub-$100, it is close to tolerable to have students simply buy one for themselves. For teaching, a JTAG debugger (enabling remote GDB and recovery from hosing the flash) would be essential but at a $320 list from Digikey, it is a bit pricey but is not necessary for each and every board. I am a bit concerned about how well it could run our current RIPPS code at only a 133 MHz processor but that gives some incentive to help speed it up / streamline it anyway. Perhaps making a hardware version of the WANRay is finally in order without having to toss on a $700 Cisco PIX box.
Initial forays into the box are very promising. I was really surprised how much stuff is running. Telnet into the box worked right away with ssh and ftp already supported. The box is also running a web server as well as a DHCP server for eth1 (labeled LAN). I did not have a chance to test the serial operations as I could not dig up a serial cable amongst my bank of cables at work.
We'll be putting up a Wiki web fairly soon to collect the various information :)
The board is quite fascinating both as an implementation platform and potentially as a teaching platform. At sub-$100, it is close to tolerable to have students simply buy one for themselves. For teaching, a JTAG debugger (enabling remote GDB and recovery from hosing the flash) would be essential but at a $320 list from Digikey, it is a bit pricey but is not necessary for each and every board. I am a bit concerned about how well it could run our current RIPPS code at only a 133 MHz processor but that gives some incentive to help speed it up / streamline it anyway. Perhaps making a hardware version of the WANRay is finally in order without having to toss on a $700 Cisco PIX box.
Initial forays into the box are very promising. I was really surprised how much stuff is running. Telnet into the box worked right away with ssh and ftp already supported. The box is also running a web server as well as a DHCP server for eth1 (labeled LAN). I did not have a chance to test the serial operations as I could not dig up a serial cable amongst my bank of cables at work.
We'll be putting up a Wiki web fairly soon to collect the various information :)
Friday, October 19, 2007
Weekly Papers - Oct 17
SMACK, aka Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel by Casey Schaufler attempts to bring MAC (Mandatory Access Control that is, not the network MAC) to the masses via a LSM in Linux. For those unfamiliar with MAC in the security context, think that everything is labeled with explicit access control and stricter rules on changing access. The CIPSO network tagging is also interesting as we had been considering how to convey local context as part of Lockdown during the TCP SYN phase.
Interesting also that the work in that it is a real live implementation.
Interesting also that the work in that it is a real live implementation.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Weekly Papers - Oct 10
Playing Devil’s Advocate: Inferring Sensitive Information from Anonymized Network Traces
The paper by Coull, Wright, Monrose, Collins, and Reiter that looks at how good the state of the art anonomyzation schemes with regards to hiding identity appeared in NDSS 2007. With a bit of data mining (clustering), DNS, and search engines, the work attempts to infer identity despite anonymization.
Very cool results demonstrating what I think those who have been skeptical of anonymization have suspected for quite some time.
The paper by Coull, Wright, Monrose, Collins, and Reiter that looks at how good the state of the art anonomyzation schemes with regards to hiding identity appeared in NDSS 2007. With a bit of data mining (clustering), DNS, and search engines, the work attempts to infer identity despite anonymization.
Very cool results demonstrating what I think those who have been skeptical of anonymization have suspected for quite some time.
Weekly Group Papers
An interesting dilemma facing a new assistant professor is how to manage their fledgling research group. During my graduate work, I came from a fairly small group (3 or 4 students maximum) where we primarily had only individual meetings. The meetings with my adviser were largely informal (just drop in) rather than a specific time. Other groups at Iowa State had specific schedules for meetings.
From my experiences as an assistant professor, I have hopped between multiple management styles, group meetings, group and individual meetings, individual-only meetings, seminar meetings, etc. Currently, we have a weekly group meeting, weekly status reports (via e-mail and on the wiki), and at least one meeting (scheduled or not) outside of the group meeting. This seems to work alright for the students that are fairly well organized near as I can tell. I have been mulling making students include written summaries of individual meetings on the wiki but have held off on that. Cristina Nita-Rotaru of Purdue mentioned how she used that to help improve student writing skills.
One of the neat changes that I started in the spring was an outgrowth of the system seminar. Each week, each student in the group must read and write a quick summary of a current research paper (in area or out) and then discuss that paper briefly in the group meeting. The summaries are posted on our Repository wiki on the NetScale server for full public consumption. Each paper summary should have the appropriate citation info, an abstract, and the DOI link if possible. The students supplement the abstract with commentary regarding the novelty of the work, future papers to follow up on, and discussion related that work to our own. The specific paper topics are often left up to the student with occasional suggestions tendered by myself.
Out of all of the various management decisions, this has certainly been one of the most successful. At a minimum, it forces the students to continually keep up on research and build their bibliography for their upcoming thesis or dissertation. The broader effect is that everyone in the group (especially myself) benefits from getting a quick summary of current work going on in the field. For myself, that can be especially challenging to find time to simply read papers outside of my normal review duties. With networking as diversified as it is across so many conferences, I do not doubt for a moment that I am missing insightful work that occurs out of the top tier conferences. I find it to be quite intellectually stimulating to poke and prod at various works to see how it might relate or could be improved. In some sense, it resembles a conference setting but at a much more rapid pace (6 to 7 papers per week from a more diverse topic pool). Amusingly enough and perhaps others would agree, I find myself the most productive in terms of new ideas when attending conferences, in part from new views imparted by the speakers but often for simply having time to think in largely uninterrupted blocks (no e-mail, no meetings, no visitors).
In keeping with the spirit of our group discussions, I will try to add in weekly posts regarding the most interesting papers discussed that week with a small bit of personal commentary. If one or two readers (most likely my entire blog reading base, ha) pick up on a more obscure paper and help give that paper a bit of prominence, I will consider my endeavor a success.
From my experiences as an assistant professor, I have hopped between multiple management styles, group meetings, group and individual meetings, individual-only meetings, seminar meetings, etc. Currently, we have a weekly group meeting, weekly status reports (via e-mail and on the wiki), and at least one meeting (scheduled or not) outside of the group meeting. This seems to work alright for the students that are fairly well organized near as I can tell. I have been mulling making students include written summaries of individual meetings on the wiki but have held off on that. Cristina Nita-Rotaru of Purdue mentioned how she used that to help improve student writing skills.
One of the neat changes that I started in the spring was an outgrowth of the system seminar. Each week, each student in the group must read and write a quick summary of a current research paper (in area or out) and then discuss that paper briefly in the group meeting. The summaries are posted on our Repository wiki on the NetScale server for full public consumption. Each paper summary should have the appropriate citation info, an abstract, and the DOI link if possible. The students supplement the abstract with commentary regarding the novelty of the work, future papers to follow up on, and discussion related that work to our own. The specific paper topics are often left up to the student with occasional suggestions tendered by myself.
Out of all of the various management decisions, this has certainly been one of the most successful. At a minimum, it forces the students to continually keep up on research and build their bibliography for their upcoming thesis or dissertation. The broader effect is that everyone in the group (especially myself) benefits from getting a quick summary of current work going on in the field. For myself, that can be especially challenging to find time to simply read papers outside of my normal review duties. With networking as diversified as it is across so many conferences, I do not doubt for a moment that I am missing insightful work that occurs out of the top tier conferences. I find it to be quite intellectually stimulating to poke and prod at various works to see how it might relate or could be improved. In some sense, it resembles a conference setting but at a much more rapid pace (6 to 7 papers per week from a more diverse topic pool). Amusingly enough and perhaps others would agree, I find myself the most productive in terms of new ideas when attending conferences, in part from new views imparted by the speakers but often for simply having time to think in largely uninterrupted blocks (no e-mail, no meetings, no visitors).
In keeping with the spirit of our group discussions, I will try to add in weekly posts regarding the most interesting papers discussed that week with a small bit of personal commentary. If one or two readers (most likely my entire blog reading base, ha) pick up on a more obscure paper and help give that paper a bit of prominence, I will consider my endeavor a success.
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