Does Wireless and Mobile Networking Research Still Matter?

Dr. Dmitri Perkins, National Science Foundation

12:00pm Wed. Feb. 27, 2019, ITE325, UMBC

The miniaturization of radio and communication technologies has led to the widespread proliferation of wireless-enabled devices and to an explosion of mobile applications and services. Without question, wireless networking has become an enabling and critical component in practically every business sector. Wireless technologies and terms, such as, WiFi, Bluetooth, and broadband cellular are now embedded in our world and have become a part of society’s regular vocabulary. Given this ever-increasing success, one might be tempted to opine whether any core research challenges remain in the wireless and mobile networking domain.

In this talk, I will present the case that the answer is most certainly “yes” and that the promise of a truly ubiquitous Wireless Internet of Everything, capable of seamlessly interconnecting billions of devices, humans, intelligent systems, information sources, and enabling transformative applications (e.g., remote healthcare monitoring) still faces a plethora of inter-related challenges. These include, for example, exponential growth in mobile traffic, dynamic spectrum allocation, real-time management of network resources, design of intelligent radio technology, energy-efficient protocol designs, and network security/trust/privacy. I will highlight our most recent work on the topic of opportunistic wireless spectrum access, which focused on practical and implementable radio spectrum management frameworks and related spectrum sensing and sharing protocols, using today’s front-end communication technology. I will also discuss my vision for developing a sustainable and nationally recognized wireless networking research program, which includes emerging areas such as networked cyber-physical systems and mobile IoT.

Dr. Dmitri Perkins is currently a Program Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), where he leads the Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) Program for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). In this role, Dr. Perkins provides oversight of 25 multi-university industry-focused research centers, spanning all areas of CISE research and comprising over 75 U.S. academic institutions, 5 international sites, and 225+ industry partners. Prior to joining the NSF in 2015, Dr. Perkins was the Hardy Edmiston Endowed Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he was the founding Director of the Wireless Systems and Performance Engineering Research (WiSPER) Laboratory. His core research interests include wireless and mobile communications, networking, and computing, with an emphasis on cognitive and adaptive protocols, formal design of experiments, performance engineering, dynamic resource and spectrum management, and security challenges. His research work spans multiple networking paradigms, including sensor/actuator networks, wireless broadband networks, multi-hop wireless networks, cognitive radio networks, and large-scale heterogeneous wireless systems. Dr. Perkins has published over 45 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers and is also the co-author of the book, Cognitive Radio Networks: From Theory to Practice. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2005 and was the recipient of the Outstanding Professor Award within the College of Sciences at the University of Louisiana in 2012. In 2013 and 2014, he was an ONR visiting research fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), conducting research on dynamic spectrum awareness in heterogeneous wireless networks. Dr. Perkins has held leadership roles at the university and national levels. He was elected to serve as the Chair of the University Graduate Council and served a two-year term as Associate Dean of the Ray P. Authement College of Sciences at the University of Louisiana in 2012-2013. He has served on the technical program committee of numerous IEEE and ACM international conferences and served on advisory committees for Computer and Networks Systems (CNS) Division of the NSF. He is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Dr. Perkins received the Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from Michigan State University in 2002 and the B.S. degree in computer science from Tuskegee University in 1995.

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Distinguished Lecture Series

OMI: The Invisible Technology that will Revolutionize Supercomputing and AI

Prof. Harm Peter Hofstee
Delft University of Technology
Distinguished Research Staff, IBM Austin Research Laboratory

3:00pm Thursday 14 February, 2019, ITE325, UMBC

In this talk, we present some major trends in compute, memory/storage, and networking, and for each we will discuss how OpenCAPI Memory Interface (OMI) and related interface technologies are set to transform how we build, program, and think about our computer systems. For the first of these trends, it allows us to compensate for the reduced growth in processor performance (per dollar) and performance per Watt. Accelerators are sharing memory and other resources over NVLink or OpenCAPI with conventional IBM POWER cores and are driving performance in the world’s largest supercomputers and IBM’s systems are targeting AI and other workloads. The second addresses the reduced improvement in memory cost and capacity. OMI allows us to use technologies other than DRAM as memory, and because many of these technologies are nonvolatile, the line between memory and storage is becoming blurred. The third, OpenCAPI-based networking leverages the rapid improvements in cost per Gb/s and allows us to contemplate systems that extend memory beyond the node using commodity infrastructure.

Harm Peter Hofstee is a Dutch physicist and computer scientist who currently is a distinguished research staff member at the IBM Austin Research Laboratory, USA, and a part-time Professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Hofstee is best known for his contributions to Heterogeneous computing as the chief architect of the Synergistic Processor Elements in the Cell Broadband Engine processor used in the Sony PlayStation 3, and the first supercomputer to reach sustained Petaflop operation. His early research work on coherently attached reconfigurable acceleration on POWER7 paved the way for the new coherent attach processor interface on POWER8. Hofstee is an IBM Master Inventor with more than 100 issued patents and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. Hofstee was born in Groningen and obtained his master’s degree in theoretical physics of the University of Groningen in 1988. He continued to study at the California Institute of Technology where he wrote a master’s thesis Constructing Some Distributed Programs in 1991 and obtained a Ph.D. with a thesis titled Synchronizing Processes in 1995. He joined Caltech as a lecturer for two years and moved to IBM in the Austin, Texas, Research Laboratory, where he had staff member, senior technical staff member and distinguished engineer positions.

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Exploiting IoT Vulnerabilities

Dr. Yatish Joshi, Senior Engineer, Cisco Systems

11:45am-1:00pm Monday, 18 February 2019, ITE 325-B

The past decade has seen explosive growth in the use and deployment of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. According to Gartner there will be about 20.8 billion IoT devices in use by 2020. These devices are seeing wide spread adoption as they are cheap, easy to use and require little to no maintenance. In most cases, setup simply requires using a web or phone app to configure Wi-Fi credentials. Digital home assistants, security cameras, smart locks, home appliances, smart switches, toys, vacuum cleaners, thermostats, leakage sensors etc are examples of IoT devices that are widely used and deployed in home and enterprise environments.

The threat landscape is constantly evolving and threat actors are always on the prowl for new vulnerabilities they can exploit. With traditional attack methods yielding fewer exploits   due to the increased focus on security testing, frequent patches, increased user awareness, Threat actors have turned their attention on IoT devices and are exploiting inherent vulnerabilities in these devices. The vulnerabilities, always ON nature, and autonomous mode of operation allow attackers to spy on users, spoof data, or leverage them as botnet infrastructure to launch devastating attacks on third parties. Mirai, a well known IoT malware utilized hundreds and thousands of enslaved IoT devices to launch DDoS attacks on Dyn affecting access to Netflix, Twitter, Github and many other websites. With the release of the Mirai source code numerous variants of the malware are infecting IoT devices across the world and using them to carry out attacks.

These attacks are made possible because the devices are manufactured without security in mind!. In this talk I will demonstrate how one can hack a widely available off-the-shelf IP Camera and router by exploiting the vulnerabilities present in these devices to get on the network, steal personal data, spy on a user, disrupt operation etc. We will also look at what can be done to mitigate the dangers posed by IOT devices.

So attend hack & defend!

Dr. Yatish Joshi is a software engineer in the Firepower division at Cisco Systems where he works on developing new features for Cisco’s security offerings. Yatish has a PhD in Computer Engineering from UMBC. Prior to Cisco Yatish worked as a lecturer at UMBC, and was a senior software engineer developing TV software at Samsung Electronics. When not working, he enjoys reading spy thrillers and fantasy novels.

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