ACM Author-Izer Service

ACM Author-Izer service allows authors to share full text of their ACM publications and Bibliometrics through their blogs and websites. A cool feature indeed! I hope IEEE too will follow. I have linked one of my publications below.

Bassa: a time shifted web caching system for developing regions

Wathsala W. Vithanage, Ajantha S. Atukorale
NSDR '11 Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on Networked systems for developing regions, 2011

Bro: An IDS that Can be Used for Collecting Network Traffic Traces

I recently started a project to archive network traffic traces with some fellow researchers from whom I learned about Bro. Bro is an amazing intrusion detection system that has been developed at UC Berkeley based on many years of research done by Prof. Vern Paxson and his team. The interesting thing about Bro is that it could be used for archiving network traffic traces with a high granularity. What this means is unlike utilities like tcpdump Bro is intelligent enough to uniquely identify connections between hosts (TCP/UDP) and application level protocols being used in those connections. As a result Bro logs network level connections, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, SSH, SSL, etc with their protocol data instead of logging raw packet headers.

Another cool feature of Bro is the new extensible logging framework which will be available in up coming version 2.0. A well written document on the extensible logging framework can be found here. Even though Bro was capable of on the fly anonymization of traces in version 1.5 it is broken and will be removed from the next version (version 2.0). According to Bro devs we will have to wait for sometime to see this very useful feature back. Until they come up with the code for it based on Pang R, et al. "A High-level Programming Environment for Packet Trace Anonymization and Transformation" I came up with a workaround that works but far less elegant (More on this in my next blog post). Since logs are anonymized sufficiently we can now carry out our research. Except for issues on trace anonymization  Bro does a fantastic job (However anonymization matters a lot when data is shared between institutions). End of the day all I can say is that Bro is fast, clean and extensible!

A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing Regions

I presented the paper titled as "A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing regions" at NSDR 2011 held in Washington D.C. on 28th of June 2011.

Bassa presentation

View more presentations from Wathsala Vithanage

A Long Awaited Report on Dalesa

I received a report on Dalesa P2P web cache from Nikhita Dulluri and Shruti Pathak on 8th May 2011. This is one of the long awaited reports on Dalesa. They have performed a performance analysis on Dalesa covering some of the key areas such as latency, number of HTTP/HTTPS packets sent/received, bandwidth saving and memory consumption. Overall it is a very positive review. I thank both Shruti and Nikhita for their valuable contribution.

Got Two Papers Accepted for IEEE - ISCC and ACM NSDR

Two of my most recent papers titled as "A Novel Classifier for Engineering Web Traffic" and "Bassa: A Time Shifted Web Caching System for Developing Regions" were accepted to 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer and Communication (ISCC) in Greece and 5th ACM workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR) in Washington D.C respectively. NSDR is an ACM Mobisys 2011 workshop. However publishing at these conferences will depend on travel grants.

ISCC

NSDR