Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, we analyze the Internet traffic from a different point of view based on Benford's law, an empirical law that describes the distribution of leading digits in a collection of numbers met in naturally occurring phenomena. We claim that Benford's law holds for the inter-arrival times of TCP flows in case of normal traffic. Consequently, any type of anomalies affecting TCP flows, including intentional intrusions or unintended faults and network failures in general, can be detected by investigating the first-digit distributions of the inter-arrival times of TCP SYN packets. In this paper we apply our findings to the detection of intentional attacks, and leave other types of... 

Routers and routing protocols are critical parts of a network infrastructure. OSPF is one of the most important routing protocols, and therefore its vulnerabilities can be very destructive. This makes its security analysis critical. There are many reported and potential vulnerabilities in OSPF protocol. Considering the complexity and the ambiguity of its description in RFC 2328, it is very valuable to design a formal model of the protocol and analyze the vulnerabilities of its critical parts. In this paper, some challenging parts of OSPF protocol along with attack scenarios are modeled by means of Colored Petri Net in CPN Tools environment. Then, the reported vulnerabilities are analyzed by... 

Traffic modeling, traffic decomposition, and traffic engineering are some of the applications of traffic characterization that are mainly based on statistical characteristics of the network traffic. Many empirical analyses on Internet traffic traces show that the flow inter-arrival time distribution generally follows the Weibull distribution. As the scale of the network becomes larger, the Weibull distribution degrades to the Poisson distribution and when the flow arrival rate is high, it asymptotically converges to the Normal distribution. The aggregated traffic on high bandwidth links is the result of statistical multiplexing of many traffic sources, and the flow arrival rate on these... 

Wireless Sensor Networks are composed of small, low cost, resource-constrained computing nodes equipped with low power wireless transceivers. In this paper, we study and model the time and energy cost of Kerberos protocol by using timed automata in WSN. We model check the protocol using UPPAAL. We show that considering time in the analysis of security protocols yield more confident results  

SUMMARY: In this paper, we study the effects of anomalies on the distribution of TCP flow interarrival time process. We show empirically that despite the variety of data networks in size, number of users, applications, and load, the interarrival times of normal flows comply with the Weibull distribution, whereas specific irregularities (anomalies) causes deviations from the distribution. We first estimate the scale and shape parameters and then check the discrepancy of the data from a Weibull distribution with the estimated parameters. We also utilize the Weibull counting model to recheck the conformance of small flow interarrival times with the distribution. We perform our experiments on a... 

This article takes a theoretical approach to focus on the algorithmic properties of hardware/software partitioning. It proposes a method with polynomial complexity to find the global optimum of an NP-hard model partitioning problem for 75% of occurrences under some practical conditions. The global optimum is approached with a lower bound distance for the remaining 25%. Furthermore, this approach ensures finding the 2-approximate of the global optimum partition in 97% of instances where technical assumptions exist. The strategy is based on intelligently changing the parameters of the polynomial model of the partitioning problem to force it to produce (or approach) the exact solution to the... 

In this paper, we study the effects of anomalies on the distribution of TCP flow interarrival time process. We show empirically that despite the variety of data networks in size, number of users, applications, and load, the interarrival times of normal flows comply with the Weibull distribution, whereas specific irregularities (anomalies) causes deviations from the distribution. We first estimate the scale and shape parameters and then check the discrepancy of the data from a Weibull distribution with the estimated parameters. We also utilize the Weibull counting model to recheck the conformance of small flow interarrival times with the distribution. We perform our experiments on a diverse... 

In recent years, the security of integrated circuits (ICs) has received more attention as usage of ICs made by untrustworthy foundries has increased in safety-critical systems [1]. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for fingerprinting the delay of functional paths in a sequential circuit that have millions of transistors, like processors. We present a method for inserting Ring Oscillators (ROs) into scan chain for measuring the delay of each functional path inside the chip. Using the proposed method, the payload part of Trojans will be detected according to their size and cell types. Our method can be used by power-based Trojan detection approaches for finding the trigger part of... 

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are receiving significant interest as the next generation of wireless networks and emerging technology in the field of health monitoring. One of the most important factors for the acceptance of WBANs is the provision of appropriate security and access control mechanisms. Due to its nature in transferring the patients' sensitive data, WBAN has both classical and specific security requirements. In this paper, we survey such requirements and propose a new security scheme for satisfying them in WBANs. The proposed scheme deals with the overall network architecture, including intra- and inter-WBAN tiers, and proposes two mutual authentication and key exchange... 

AQM router aims primarily to control the network congestion through marking/dropping packets which are used as congestion feedback in traffic sources to balance their flow rate. However, stabilizing queuing delay and maximizing link utilization have been considered as the main control objectives, especially in media dominated networks. Usually, most of the AQM algorithms are designed for a nominal operating point. However, time-varying nature of network parameters frequently violates their robustness bounds. In this paper, a self-tuning compensated PID controller is proposed to address the time-varying nature of network conditions caused by parameter variations and unresponsive connections.... 

Payload attribution systems (PAS) are one of the most important tools of network forensics for detecting an offender after the occurrence of a cybercrime. A PAS stores the network traffic history in order to detect the source and destination pair of a certain data stream in case a malicious activity occurs on the network. The huge volume of information that is daily transferred in the network means that the data stored by a PAS must be as compact and concise as possible. Moreover, the investigation of this large volume of data for a malicious data stream must be handled within a reasonable time. For this purpose, several techniques based on storing a digest of traffic using Bloom filters... 

AQM router aims primarily to control the network congestion through marking/dropping packets which are used as congestion feedback in traffic sources to balance their flow rate. However, stabilizing queuing delay and maximizing link utilization have been considered as the main control objectives, especially in media dominated networks. Usually, most of the AQM algorithms are designed for a nominal operating point. However, time-varying nature of network parameters frequently violates their robustness bounds. In this paper, a self-tuning compensated PID controller is proposed to address the time-varying nature of network conditions caused by parameter variations and unresponsive connections.... 

This paper studies the challenge of accurate FFT computation. A generic and error-free encoding is proposed based on the algebraic integers (AIs). A wise AI-based encoding may greatly decrease the error due to the non-trivial twiddle factors in the FFT computation. Further, a new method for predicting the well-pruned architecture is presented which helps designing an optimized and low-cost architecture when using the AI-based encoding. In order to examine the proposed AI-based FFT computation and also the procedure of designing an optimized architecture, a custom AI-based 16-point radix-2 2 FFT architecture has been designed and implemented using 180-nm CMOS technology. Experimental results... 

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) should be capable of fulfilling its mission, in a timely manner. Therefore, we propose a quantitative real-time model for multihop WSN. "Real-time degree" describes the percentage of real-time data that the network can deliver on time from any source to its destination. Most of network properties are considered as random variables and a queuing-theory based model is derived. In this model, the effect of network load on the packets ' delay and the "real-timeliness" of the network are considered. Simulation results are used to validate the proposed model. The simulation results agree very well with the model. © 2007 IEEE  

In this paper, we introduce novel mechanisms for measuring and evaluating the performance of a network and its devices, configured especially for Voice over IP (VoIP). We study the effects of different configurations on final voice quality by enabling or changing the related equipment features. In our study we quantify quality changes based on different router configurations and discuss precisely to what extent and how much this quality is improved versus features or special configurations of network devices. These results can be used for two purposes: compare and benchmark different routers in order to know which one is proper for a typical VoIP network, and select the best configurations.... 

Hardware prefetching schemes which divide the misses into streams are generally preferred to other hardware based schemes. But, as they do not know when the next miss of a stream happens, they cannot prefetch a block in appropriate time. Some of them use a substantial amount of hardware storage to keep the predicted miss blocks from all streams. The other approaches follow the program flow and prefetch all target addresses including those blocks which already exist in the L1 data cache. The approach presented predicts the stream of next miss and then prefetches only the next miss address of the stream. It offers a general prefetching framework, two-phase prediction algorithm (TPP), that lets... 

Time synchronization is one of the main issues for guaranteeing the correctness of actions depending on the time of measured data or detected events by electronic devices across industrial networks. According to the accuracy needed in different applications and networks, several synchronization protocols or algorithms have been proposed so far. The Precision Time Protocol, PTP, is one of the most accurate synchronization protocols introduced for automation applications. It has also been used in power grids and digital substations. However, due to the variety of cyber-attacks in electrical power systems in recent years, its security should be considered and evaluated as other substation... 

Software-defined network (SDN) is an emerging network architecture in which the network control task is separated from packet forwarding. This architecture can be considered as a suitable infrastructure for fifth-generation mobile network (5G) and Internet of things due to its flexibility and dynamism. In real-time networks, time-sensitive packets that miss their deadlines are considered useless or less worthy. As with traditional networks, SDN is expected to support real-time communications and handle a variety of failures (including local controller, switch, and link failures) simultaneously. This study focuses on real-time communication of time-sensitive applications that operate on... 

This paper proposes a novel and efficient real time network architecture, named RT-TelSurg, for one of the most appealing tactile Internet applications, i.e., Telesurgery. In telesurgery, the patient's vital signs and status and the required robotic commands during the surgery should be received on time. Otherwise, the life of the patient or the safety of the operation is endangered. Hence, transmitted packets should meet their respective relative deadlines. Software-defined networking is a relatively new architecture for computer and telecommunications networks in which the network control plane is separated from the data plane. One way to achieve real time telesurgery is to employ cloud... 

On-time delivery of network flows is crucial to ensure the quality of service of deadline-constrained applications. Today, real time applications have various uses in multimedia communications, the Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G (5th generation mobile network) technology. In Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture, the controller has a global view of the network. Hence, it is possible to enrich the features of the controller and/or forwarding devices to support real time communication. In this paper, we propose a firm real time software-defined approach (FRT-SDN) for real time communication and present a novel solution for the real time forwarding/routing of time-sensitive applications...