Seminar Series on Advances in Telecommunications, Networking and Computing

This seminar series is organized by the Department of Networked Systems and Services to provide unique opportunities to meet internationally recognized leading experts in the fields of Telecommunications, Networking and Computing. The lectures will be given in English by prominent foreign researchers from academia and industry, and they will be open to ALL interested colleagues, PhD students, and students. There is no fixed schedule for the seminar, but the lectures will be organized based on the availability of the invited lecturers, and they will be announced via various mailing lists. In addition, slides and up-to-date information on the program will be published on this site.

For further information, please, contact Dr. Levente Buttyán, Program Chair by e-mail (buttyan (at) hit.bme.hu) or telephone (+36 1 463 1803).

Past years: 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013

Program in 2014

Planned seminars:

Google calendar for ATNC seminars

Program in details

On Mobile Malware

Abstract: There is little information from independent sources in the public domain about mobile malware infection rates. The only previous independent estimate (0.0009%), was based on indirect measurements obtained from domain-name resolution traces. In this talk, we present the first independent study of malware infection rates and associated risk factors using data collected directly from over 55,000 Android devices. We find that the malware infection rates in Android devices estimated using two malware datasets (0.28% and 0.26%), though small, are significantly higher than the previous independent estimate.

Based on the hypothesis that some application stores have a greater density of malicious applications and that advertising within applications and cross-promotional deals may act as infection vectors, we investigate whether the set of applications used on a device can serve as an indicator for infection of that device. Our analysis indicates that, while not an accurate indicator of infection by itself, the application set does serve as an inexpensive method for identifying the pool of devices on which more expensive monitoring and analysis mechanisms should be deployed. Using our two malware datasets we show that this indicator performs up to about five times better at identifying infected devices than the baseline of random checks. Such indicators can be used, for example, in the search for new or previously undetected malware. It is therefore a technique that can complement standard malware scanning. Our analysis also demonstrates a marginally significant difference in battery use betwee infected and clean devices.

Short bio: N. Asokan is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Aalto University and a Professor Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. Until recently, he worked in industrial research laboratories designing and building secure systems, first at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and then at Nokia Research Center. His primary research interest has been in applying cryptographic techniques to design secure protocols for distributed systems. Recently, he has been focusing on security for mobile devices and users.

Understanding and Breaking Freenet

Abstract: Freenet, the most prominent system for censorship-resistant publication, exhibits long delays and low success rates for finding and retrieving content. At a higher performance, Freenet, being highly scalable due its decentralized design, is a promising solution to provide efficient protection against mass surveillance and censorship for millions of users. In order to improve its performance, an in-depth understanding of the deployed system is required. Therefore, we performed an extensive measurement study accompanied by a code analysis to identify bottlenecks of the existing algorithms and obtained a realistic user model for the improvement and evaluation of new algorithms. In the talk I will give an overview of some of our results, showing that 1) the current neighbor selection in the Opennet mode of Freenet is suboptimal for routing, 2) small Darknets adjacent to the Opennet decrease the success rate drastically, and 3) the session length in Freenet is well modeled by a lognormal distribution similar to other P2P systems, but exhibits a much higher median value of two hours in contrast to 30 minutes measured in other systems. Analysing Freenet we additionally discovered significant weaknesses to sabotage, and I will demonstrate the effect of simple, practical attacks that are able to break Freenet in its entirety.

Short bio: Thorsten Strufe holds the chair of Privacy and Security at TU Dresden. His main research interests are privacy on the social Web and the resilience of networked systems. He specifically has been working on decentralized social networking and recommendation services with privacy, designed and co-developed Safebook, and has contributed to the DoS resilience and feasibility of distributed cloud and overlay streaming services. Prior to his current position, he obtained his PhD from TU Ilmenau, stayed for a postdoc at EURECOM and has been professor for Peer-to-Peer systems at TU Darmstadt and CASED.

Silence is Golden: exploiting silence and jamming to communicate

Abstract: Jamming techniques require just moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this talk we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this dreadful but yet realistic adversary model, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128 bits long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots in the presence of a jammer that jams all on-the-fly communications as well as the 74% of the silent radio spectrum--while competing proposals simply fail. The provided solution enjoys a thorough theoretical analysis and is supported by extensive simulation results, showing the viability of our proposal.

Short bio: Gabriele Oligeri is a Senior Research Engineer at the University of Roma Tre. He received the laurea degree in Computer Engineering from University of Pisa in 2005, and the Ph.D. in Information Engineering from the same University in 2010. He has been a Post-doc at CNR-ISTI for the period 2010-2011 and at University of Trento for the period 2011-2013. His research interests include security and privacy in distributed systems.

Trajectory-Based Market Models: Arbitrage and Pricing Intervals

Abstract: The talk develops general, discrete, non-probabilistic market models and a natural minmax pricing rule leading to a pricing interval. Several properties of the price bounds are obtained, in particular a connection with risk neutral pricing is established for the case of perfect hedging. Conditions are studied for the absence of arbitrage.

Short bio: Sebastian Ferramdo is a member of RAMLab and the Mathematical Finance group at Ryerson. His research interests are in Financial Mathematics, Stochastic Processes and Signal Processing and Applications. His research is supported by grants from NSERC, MITACS, and Ryerson.

Model of Multi-Rate Queue with Randomized Access Scheme

Abstract: The Markov model of multi-rate queue without buffer and with randomized access scheme is considered. In this model the multichannel system, containing N>1 channels, receives a Poisson stream of heterogeneous calls. Every new incoming call with the probability σ_i, requires for service simultaneously b_i channels,1<=b_i<=N,i=1,...,K, meanwhile σ_1+...+σ_k=1. The holding time of the i-calls is a random variable subjected to an exponentially distribution law with the known parameter. The system uses a randomized scheme for access. The access matrix of the dimension KxN is determined, which elements α_i(n) indicates the probability of reception of the i-call for service, if at the time of its arrival the number of busy channels equals n; with the complementary probability 1-α_i (n) this call is lost. In this model interruption of service process of the call of any type is not allowed, i.e. it is assumed that α_i (n)=0 for any i = 1,...,K, if n > N-b_i. A new method to determining the QoS metrics (stationary blocking probability of heterogeneous calls and the average number of the busy channels) of the studied model while using the proposed access scheme is developed. The application of the proposed method in integral wireless network with multi-parametric access scheme is considered.

Short bio: Agassi Melikov received his degree in Mathematics at Baku State University, Azerbaijan in 1977, PhD in Control Theory from Institute of Automatics, Kiev, in 1984, and Doctor of Sciences in Computer Science from Department of Applied Mathematics at Kiev National Technical University, Ukraine in 1992. He was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Eastern Mediterranean University of Cyprus from August of 1999 to August of 2000. He was also a Visiting Scholar in the Telecommunication Mathematics Research Centre at the Korea University, Seoul, from April of 2006 to June of 2006. He is currently Head of Department of Information Technologies at National Aviation Academy of Azerbaijan and Head of Department of Teletraffic at Institute of Control Systems, National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan. His current research interests are in teletraffic and queuing theory and their applications. He has published around 100 papers in internationally refereed journals such as Automation & Remote Control, Computer Communications, Cybernetics and System Sciences, Journal of Automation and Information Sciences, Journal of Applied Mathematics, Automatic Control and Computer Sciences, Engineering Simulation and etc. He is author of two monographs which published by Springer in 2010 and 2014 years. In 2001 he was selected for Associate Member of National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan in the field of Information Technologies. He is a member of Editorial Board of the journals Applied Mathematics (Scientific Research, USA) and Resent Patents on Electrical Engineering (Bentham Science Publisher, USA), Applied and Computational Mathematics (Azerbaijan). He is a Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Operational Research.