Li Chen
Electrical Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan Logic In-Field Repair Research
Sponsor: Rick Wong
This proposal introduces a built-in self-repair (BISR) technology to address the logic in-field repair. We propose a block-based logic repair method, taking into the consideration of regularity of random logic. The reconfigurable elements can be gates, adders, multipliers, or even higher level components. 4 or 8 elements can be grouped into one block, for example 4 functional elements including one as backup. There are switch matrix for input of the blocks to select the corresponding elements. Most of the faults including stuck-at faults and open-circuits faults can be isolated using this switching method. Built-in self-test (BIST) is to be performed for each local logic blocks to detect the faults during every power-up event. A test pattern is applied to the reconfigurable block by a self-test scan chin, which is administrated by a central unit. Current sensing techniques can be combined into the scan chain for fault detection. This method can be expected to have a hardware overhead of 10-20% if large blocks are used for switching.
Ramana Rao Kompella
Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University Towards Better Modeling of Communication Activity Dynamics in Large-Scale Online Social Networks
Sponsor: Keith Griffin
Online social networks (OSNs) have witnessed tremendous growth and popularity over the recent years. The huge success and increasing popularity of social networks makes it important to characterize and study their behavior in detail. Recent work in analyzing online social network data has focused primarily on either static social network structure (e.g., a fixed network of friendship links) or evolving social networks (e.g., a network where friendship links are added over time). However, popular OSNs sites provide mechanisms to form and maintain community over time by facilitating communication (e.g., Wall postings, e-mail), content sharing (e.g., photographs, videos, links), and other forms of activities. Analyzing social activity networks formed by observing who engages with whom in a particular activity is an important area of research that has received very little attention to date. This goal of this project is to develop methods to support the analysis and modeling of activity networks. We propose to address several weaknesses of previous related work with respect to this goal: (1) Although researchers are beginning to focus on activity networks, most studies have focused primarily on friendship networks and as such, activity networks have not been studied as well. (2) Sampling approaches have either focused on static graphs or graphs that are fully observable, neither of which is appropriate for large-scale streaming data common in activity networks. (3) Evaluation of sampling algorithms has focused on the accuracy of graph metric estimation---there has been little work on developing a theoretical framework for the task and on understanding the theoretical tradeoffs between preserving various properties of the graph. (4) Research on network evolution models has focused on the underlying network structure (i.e., friendships) rather than on activity traffic that is overlaid on the existing network structure. In this project, we propose to address the afore-mentioned issues by developing a suite of algorithmic and analytic methods to support the characterization and modeling of activity networks. In particular, our key contributions are : (1) We
will conduct extensive static and temporal characterization studies of social network activity, comparing the observed properties to those of the underlying
friendship network. (2) We will study sampling techniques that can preserve graph properties for different communication activity graphs. (3) We will
investigate the fundamental theoretical trade-offs between preserving different properties of the graph and investigate different types of sampling errors to
either adjust or correct for bias. (4) We will develop procedural modeling techniques to generate social network activity graphs conditioned on the
underlying network structure and profile information to better represent the temporal dynamics and burstiness of activity patterns.
Frank Mueller
Department of Computer Sciences, NC State University A Benchmark Suite to Assess Soft Routing Capabilities of Advanced Architectures
Sponsor: Steve Luck
Advanced architectures provide novel opportunities to replace costly ASICs currently used for routers. Such commodity architectures allow routing to be performed in software. The objective of this work is to define metrics and create a benchmark suite that automatically derives quantitative measurements to allow different architectures to be compared as to their suitability for soft routing. The goal of this project is to identify suitable metrics, develop test kernels and package the resulting software so that measurements can be easily obtained on generic architectures. Our vision is that this benchmark suite be widely utilized not only by Cisco but also by hardware vendors to further the capabilities of their architectures by providing specific ISA support for soft routing. Such a development would result in a competitive marketplace for architectural support of soft routing and could significantly contribute to cut costs for future routing development.
Robert Beverly
Department of Computer Sciences, Naval Postgraduate School Transport-Layer Identification of Botnets and Malicious Traffic
Sponsor: Daniel Quinlan
Botnets, collections of compromised hosts operating under common control, typically for nefarious purposes, are a scourge. Modern botnets are increasingly sophisticated and economically and politically motivated. Despite commercial defenses and research efforts, botnets continue to impart both direct and indirect damage upon users, service providers, and the Internet at large.
We propose a unique approach to detecting and mitigating botnet activity within the network core via transport-level (e.g. TCP) traffic signal analysis. Our key insight is that local botnet behavior manifests remotely as a discriminative signal. Rather than examining easily forged and abundant IP addresses, or attempting to hone-in on command-and-control or content signatures, our proof-of-concept technique is distinct from current practice and research. Using statistical signal characterization methods, we believe we can exploit botnets' basic requirement to source large amounts of data, be it attacks, spam or other malicious traffic. The resulting traffic signal provides a difficult-to-subvert discriminator.
Our initial prototype [3] validates this framework as applied to a common botnet activity: abusive electronic mail. Abusive email imparts significant impact on both providers [2] and users. Not only did this prototype yield highly promising results without reputation (e.g. blacklists, clustering, etc.) or content (e.g. Bayesian filters) analysis, it has several important benefits. First, because our technique is IP address and content agnostic, it is privacy-preserving and therefore may be run in the network core. Second, in-core operation can stanch malicious traffic before it saturates access links. Third, by exploiting the root-signature of the attacks, the traffic itself, botnet operators must either acquire more nodes or send traffic more slowly, either of which imparts an economic cost on the botnet.
The fundamental technical approach of our prototype, treating the traffic signal as a lowest-level primitive, without relying on brittle heuristics or reputation measures, has the potential to generalize to many security contexts. We propose to investigate using transport-traffic analysis in new contexts and in conjunction with additional data to perform multi-layer correlation. Of particular interest is the dual of the abusive traffic problem, identifying the scam and botnet hosting infrastructure to avert phishing and malware propagation attacks. Longer-term, we believe the method can benefit service providers by detecting and reacting automatically to third-party congestion experienced by their customers, whether induced by faults, overloads, or attacks.
Andrew Lippman
MIT Media Laboratory Viral Transaction
Sponsor: Bruce Davie
We propose a focused, one-year research effort to address the architectures and applications of "Proximal networking." We explore this in the context of transactions, which we define as instances of doing business or engaging in a negotiation of some kind in a place, with a purpose, and with people or institutions that are nearby. Unlike pure "cyberspace" explorations, this is a realization of a means for advertising, enabling, and adding programmability to the transactions that we engage in during normal life, in real places, with real people. Also, unlike social networks that assume an a priori connection between people realized through communications, our networks are space-dependent, time-varying, and opportunistic.
Chunming Qiao
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, SUNY Buffalo Basic Research in Human Factors aware Cyber-Transportation Systems
Sponsor: Sateesh Addepalli, Lillian Dai
A cyber transportation system (CTS), which applies the latest technologies in cyber and vehicular systems and transportation engineering, can be critically useful to our society, as it can reduce accidents, congestion, pollution, and energy consumption. As the effectiveness and efficiency of CTS will largely depend on how human drivers could benefit from and respond to such a system, this project proposes multi-disciplinary research which, for the first time, takes human factors (HF) into account when designing and evaluating new CTS tools and applications to improve both traffic safety and traffic operations. The proposed research will focus on novel HF-aware algorithms and protocols for prioritization and address routing/scheduling and fusion of various CTS messages, so as to reduce drivers' response time and workload, prevent duplicate and conflicting warnings, and ultimately improve safety and comfort. An integrated traffic and network simulator capable of evaluating these and other CTS algorithms and applications will also be developed and used to complement other ongoing experimental activities at Cisco and elsewhere.
Li Chen
Electrical Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan Investigate the root cause of Intersil DC-DC convertor failure using pulsed laser
Sponsor: Shi-Jie Wen (shwen)
One end customer of Cisco experienced unusual high field failure rate with network linecards in a wafer fab. The root cause was traced down to a DC-DC converter supplied by Intersil Inc. In order to further locate the root cause in the converter, pulsed laser experiments are proposed to continue the investigation. The objective of the project is to use the pulsed laser facility at University of Saskatchewan to scan the DC-DC converter to identify the most sensitive devices in term of laser energy. The most sensitive devices should be the root cause of the failure observed in the field tests. We aim to publish the research results in the related conferences and journals.
Sang Baeg
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University Logic In-Field Repair Research
Sponsor: Rick Wong
Major reliability issues such as SER, NBTI, and VDDmin are increasingly difficult to detect and diagnose in emerging technologies. The proposed research work is to develop innovative way of designing flip-flops to detect and diagnose such reliability faults in flip-flop elements. In the proposed method, the noise margin can be programmed for a subset of flip-flop elements; it establish targeted reliability window to selectively screen the reliability level of corresponding flip-flops. A novel method of grouped flip-flop (GF) is proposed as the key structure to effectively implement the programmable noise margin for GF. The research activity includes re-designing the scan logic in GF, performing physical structure design of GF, finding test pattern dependency, and determining the programmable noise margin range with the N flip-flops in GF.
Jacob A. Abraham
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin Mapping Component-Level Models to the System and Application Levels
Proposal Type:Cisco Research
Sponsor: Bill Eklow
Complexity is the primary stumbling block to the effective analysis of computer systems. Thus, analyzing complex systems, including Systems-on-Chip (SoCs), for verification, test generation or power consumption is exacerbated by the increasing complexity of integrated circuits. In addition, technology trends are increasing the complexity of the basic component models in a system. The result is that most tools can only deal with relatively small components in the design.
This proposal is based on our novel techniques for mapping module-level constraints to the system and application levels. We have applied them to enable at-speed tests which target desired faults in a module (such as stuck-at faults or small delay defects), and which can be applied from the system-level inputs without relying on additional on-chip circuitry. Recent research has used the ideas to find functionally valid system-level vectors which produce peak power in an embedded module. These techniques have been applied to instruction-set processors, and will be extended to enable other targets, such as application-specific systems, to be analyzed effectively. Other problems addressed will include abstractions to manage the complexity of test generation, measures of coverage, and architectural support for the mapping process.
Krishnendu Chakrabarty
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University Fault-Isolation Technology for System Availability and Diagnostic Coverage Measurement
Sponsor: Xinlu Gu
The proposed work is on optimized fault-insertion (FI) technology for understanding the impact of physical defects and intermittent/transient faults on chip, board, and system operation of electronic products. It includes theoretical research on optimization, statistical inference, self-learning theory, etc., for fault diagnosis, as well as evaluation using public-domain benchmarks. Research results will be disseminated through conference and journal publications.
Kenneth E. Goodson
Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University Power and Thermal Engineering of Microprocessors & ASICS in Router Systems
Sponsor: Judy Priest
Router and switching systems face mounting challenges relating to power consumption, noise, and reliability. Power consumption is comprised of the delivery of high power to drive devices and an almost equal amount of heat to be removed. Much progress can be made by leveraging the improved thermal management technologies developed for the electronics industry over the past decade, which may enable significant reductions in fan power consumption and noise at projected chip power generation levels. This work quantifies these potential benefits by developing electrothermal simulations of chips and chip networks and by helping CISCO develop a systematic chip temperature measurement approach. In a parallel effort, this work will examine the power distribution network in CISCO network chips and study techniques to modulate and optimize the delivery of energy. The proposed work will be a joint collaboration between the Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering Departments of Stanford University.
Massimiliano Pala
Computer Science Department, Dartmouth College Portable PKI System Interface for Internet Enabled Devices and Operating Systems
Sponsor: Max Pritikin
In a 2003 analysis of a PKI survey OASIS identified that the three most urgent obstacles for PKI wide adoption are: the high cost of PKI setup and management, usability issues (both at user and management levels), and the lack of support for PKI technology in applications. In particular, a major issue when developing applications is the absence of a standard, well-designed, and easy-to-use API for PKI operations. Subsequent work from OASIS in 2005 showed that not much has changed since 2003. Today, developing PKI-enabled applications is still difficult. When it comes to using digital certificates in network devices like routers or access points, integrating PKIs functionalities is even harder because of limited capabilities or complex programming interfaces. Thus, providing a usable interface for the final user (i.e., the network administrators) is extremely difficult.
This project will address PKI usability and complexity issues by development of a standard API and an associated abstraction. More specifically we will focus on portability and usability of PKI applications. In order to achieve portability, we will standardize the API specifications by writing a new Internet Draft. This public document will allow other developers, cryptographic libraries providers, or Operating System vendors to implement our API across different systems (eg., computers, network equipment, portable devices, sensors, etc.). Regarding usability, we will focus on making PKI operations easy for the developer. We will leverage our extensive experience (both in the academic and in the "real" world) in order to raise the "usability-bar" of PKIs and lower software development costs associated with digital certificates usage.
Project Objectives:
We propose to study, design and implement an highly usable API for PKI operations. More specifically we will investigate, develop and standardize a new API specification that will enable developers to easily integrate and/or implement PKI functionalities in Applications and Operating Systems. In contrast to existing all-purpose cryptographic libraries, our work will focus on providing an abstraction layer capable of integrating existing protocols (e.g., SCEP, PRQP) into simple high-level PKI-specific calls. In particular, we will simplify the interactions between End-Entities and Certification Authorities and how to integrate authorization information processing in secure communication between peers. By analogy, this project will provide the same benefits in portability and usability as the POSIX interface provided for modern Operating Systems.
Expected Outcomes:
As a result, our work will help to lower costs associated with the adoption of digital certificates and public key cryptography for authentication purposes, especially Internet-connected devices. Moreover this work will allow PKI adopters to focus more on the applications themselves, where security benefits and return on investment are easier to demonstrate.
Larry Smarr
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego Integration of Cisco Telepresence with OptIPortals
Sponsors: Bill Mauchly, JJ Jamison
Cisco TelePresence provides corporations with a complete, high-quality high-definition video teleconferencing system. It consists of one-to-three panel high-definition displays, with an additional screen for PowerPoint slides, and uses excellent proprietary technology for codecs and runs over telecom provided dedicated DS3 circuits. Cisco TelePresence, however, does not provide academics or government and corporate decision makers with combined video teleconferencing and advanced data displays that cover entire walls, that provide advanced interactive capabilities, and that run over the National LambdaRail (NLR).
We plan to integrate Cisco TelePresence with the NSF-funded OptIPuter software and display technology, to prototype a system for digital collaboration among researchers in universities, government, and industry that can be rapidly expanded to data-intensive researchers at campuses connected to NLR. A key motivation for this initiative would be to provide a prototype that will be oriented to requirements that must be met in the next few years. The current TelePresence model is based on common services and technology readily available today at almost all fairly well connected locations. The OptIPuter reflects emerging advanced capabilities that can be implemented at selected sites using specialized technologies and configurations. This proposed project would demonstrate both how the OptIPuter techniques can significantly enhance the current TelePresence environment and how this environment can be extended to meet emerging future requirements -- reflecting capabilities anticipated in the next few years. Such capabilities will include much higher capacity, performance, and quality of communication services.
Amin Vahdat
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego A Virtualized Service Infrastructure for Global Data Delivery
Sponsors: Vina Ermagan, Pere Monclus
This project will investigate novel models for delivering application functionality and virtualized storage across an ensemble of cloud data centers spread across the Internet. The work proposes naming data objects as the fundamental mechanism for naming resources, rather than the traditional approach of employing IP addresses. On top of this base abstraction, we will investigate two inter-locking issues. First, we will investigate various consistency models for the underlying data. Given limited reliability of individual Internet paths, we argue that data replication across multiple data centers is fundamental to achieving high levels of availability (five nines). In the face of such replication, a critical question is the model—and the required network support—for delivering a range of consistency semantics to applications and clients making use of the data. Second, we will investigate API's and implementation techniques for layering a range of data structures on top of the underlying object store. For instance, we will explore the ability to explore replicated, consistent queues, trees, hash tables, graphs, etc. as the fundamental building block for application construction and communication.
Qiang Xu
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Physical Defect Test for NTF with Minimized Test Efforts
Sponsor: Xinlu Gu
No Trouble Found (NTF) devices refer to those devices that are returned from system customers as having failed in-field but refuse to fail with a retest on automatic test equipment (ATE). Such phenomenon is one of the most serious challenges for test engineers because it is very difficult, if not impossible, to identify the root cause for the problems of such devices without being able to repeat the failure. To tackle this problem, in this project, we plan to investigate the fundamental reasons for the occurrence of NTF phenomenon and develop novel layout-aware testing techniques that enable the circuit under test (CUT) to behave as the worst-case operational states in its functional mode. By doing so, we can mimic the behavior of the CUT close to its functional operations at ATE, thus dramatically reducing the NTF rates for returned defective devices.
Raymond Yeung
Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Two Problems in Network Coding
Sponsor: Dougla Chan
We propose to work on two problems in network coding. The first problem is a fundamental problem that extends the theory of network coding from block code and convolutional code to variable-length code. This extension has the potential of combining source coding and network coding for joint optimization. The second problem is to study the distributed scheduling and replication strategies of a peer-to-peer system for content distribution, including coding based strategies. The result should be useful for content distribution, whether streaming or VoD, which is projected to be the predominate usage of network bandwidth in the coming years.
