204766
Scalability, fidelity, and containment in the potemkin virtual honeyfarm
The rapid evolution of large-scale worms, viruses and bot-nets have made Internet malware a pressing concern. Such infections are at the root of modern scourges including DDoS extortion, on-line identity theft, SPAM, phishing, and piracy. However, the most widely used tools for gathering intelligence on new malware -- network honeypots -- have forced investigators to choose between monitoring activity at a large scale or capturing behavior with high fidelity. In this paper, we describe an approach to minimize this tension and improve honeypot scalability by up to six orders of magnitude while still closely emulating the execution behavior of individual Internet hosts. We have built a prototype honeyfarm system, called Potemkin, that exploits virtual machines, aggressive memory sharing, and late binding of resources to achieve this goal. While still an immature implementation, Potemkin has emulated over 64,000 Internet honeypots in live test runs, using only a handful of physical servers.
6409733
Routing in an Internet-scale network emulator
One of the primary challenges facing scalable network emulation and simulation is the overhead of storing network-wide routing tables or computing appropriate routes on a per-packet basis. We present an approach to routing table calculation and storage based on spanning tree construction that provides an order of magnitude reduction in routing table size for Internet-like topologies. In our approach, we maintain a variable number of spanning trees for a given topology and choose the path between two hosts in each tree, choosing the shortest. We also populate offline a negative cache of actual shortest paths for source-destination pairs - typically a few percent of the total - where the lookups result in sub-optimal routes. We have implemented our technique in a popular network emulator, ModelNet, and show that our enhanced version can emulate Internet topologies 10-100 times larger than previously possible.
14121852
Programming by demonstration - constructing task level plans in hybrid dynamic framework
This paper presents a novel approach to constructing a task level plan for an assembly task from demonstration. A hybrid dynamic system is chosen as an attractive way to model assembly tasks. We propose a framework where the mappings required within the hybrid dynamic system model are extracted from a demonstration. We extract the event path planner mapping, which determines a task level plan. Demonstrated paths are broken down into their base elements, called transitions. A path plan is then constructed from transitions that were well demonstrated. We test the approach by having a robot execute an assembly task using constructed task plans. The framework produces excellent results because: 1) the robot can perform selected paths better than when it simply copies the demonstrator, and 2) it allows flexible path selection so the robot can be given a disposition in how it executes the task.
691108
Utilization-based admission control for real-time applications
In this paper, we present a methodology to use utilization-based admission control in guaranteed real-time communication in a scalable fashion. We make admission control scalable by using a configuration-time test to determine a safe utilization level of servers. Admission control at run-time then is reduced to simple utilization tests on the servers along the path of the new flow. Furthermore, we discuss how appropriate route selection improve utilization levels, design a safe route selection heuristic algorithm to achieve high utilization of resources, and derive two bounds on the maximum utilization level for given traffic in a network. We compare the results of our route selection heuristics with that of a shortest-path based algorithm, and find that our heuristics can achieve a much higher maximum utilization level than that of the shortest-path based algorithm.
16627993
Increased display size and resolution improve task performance in Information-Rich Virtual Environments
Physically large-size high-resolution displays have been widely applied in various fields. There is a lack of research, however, that demonstrates empirically how users benefit from the increased size and resolution afforded by emerging technologies. We designed a controlled experiment to evaluate the individual and combined effects of display size and resolution on task performance in an Information-Rich Virtual Environment (IRVE). We also explored how a wayfinding aid would facilitate spatial information acquisition and mental map construction when users worked with various displays. We found that users were most effective at performing IRVE search and comparison tasks on large high-resolution displays. In addition, users working with large displays became less reliant on wayfinding aids to form spatial knowledge. We discuss the impact of these results on the design and presentation of IRVEs, the choice of displays for particular applications, and future work to extend our findings.
15937276
Web-based intuitive and effective design of symmetric tiles
This paper presents a new approach for intuitive and effective design of periodic symmetric tiles. We observe that planar graphs can effectively represent symmetric tiles and graph drawing provides an intuitive paradigm for designing symmetric tiles. Moreover, based on our theoretical work to represent hexagonal symmetry by rectangular symmetry, we are able to present all symmetric tiles as graphs embedded on a torus and based on simple modulo operations. This approach enables us to develop a simple and efficient algorithm, which has been implemented in Java. By using this software, designers, architects and artists can create interesting symmetric tiles directly on the web. We also have designed a few examples of symmetric tiles to show the effectiveness of the approach.
932171
On strong Menger-connectivity of star graphs
Motivated by parallel routing in networks with faults, we study the following graph theoretical problem. Let G be a graph of minimum vertex degree d. We say that G is strongly Menger-connected if for any copy Gf of G with at most d - 2 nodes removed, every pair of nodes u and v in Gf are connected by min{degf(u), degf(v)} node-disjoint paths in Gf, where degf(u) and degf(v) are the degrees of the nodes u and v in Gf, respectively. We show that the star graphs, which are a recently proposed attractive alternative to the widely used hypercubes as network models, are strongly Menger-connected. An algorithm of optimal running time is developed that constructs the maximum number of node-disjoint paths of nearly optimal length in star graphs with faults.