Net Insecurity, Cybersecurity, and New Future Internet Architectures

I was mesmerized by the terrific article in The Washington Post written by Craig Timberg entitled: Net Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.

Not only did it feature David Clark of MIT, who spoke at the Cybersecurity Rosk Analysis for Enterprise Risk Security Workshop that my Isenberg School of Management and College of Engineering colleagues and I organized, with funding provided by the Advanced Cyber Security Center (ACSC)  and which took place at the Sloan School of MIT last September, but also Richard Stallman, who was a keynote speaker at the INFORMS Computing Society Conference this past January (and I had the pleasure of not only speaking with him but also sharing a taxi with him to the airport).

Below are photos of Clark and Stallman (with my great INFORMS colleagues Bob Fourer and Matt Saltzman)  that I took at these respective events.

In Timberg's Post article, Clark is quoted as saying in regards to the development of the Internet that: "It’s not that we didn’t think about security,” Clark recalled. “We knew that there were untrustworthy people out there, and we thought we could exclude them.”

The Post article ends with the following prescient sentences: In 2008, Clark crafted a new list of priorities for a National Science Foundation project on building a better Internet. The first item was, simply, “Security.” I  could not agree more.

Coincidentally, on June 1 and 2,  the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) Spring 2015 meeting is taking place at MIT at the Stata building. Although I am in Sweden and will be taking part in a Finance conference in Gothenburg, two of my doctoral students will be presenting there on our NSF ChoiceNet project work, since we are one of five teams selected (and sponsored) by the NSF as part of its very ambitious and visionary Future Internet Architecture program.  Our ChoiceNet project aims to construct an economy plane for the Internet, which will allow more choices and cybersecurity is, of course, a possible primary feature.

Specifically, on June 2, my doctoral student, Shivani Shukla, will be presenting the poster below, which is based on a paper of ours: "Game Theoretic Model for Cybersecurity with Nonlinear Budget Constraints."

My doctoral student, Sara Saberi, will be presenting a poster on our paper, "A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition in Both Content and Network Provision," that was published in the INFORMS journal Service Science. The paper was co-authored with the lead PI on our NSF project, Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst.

My first paper on cybercrime, "A Multiproduct Network Economic Model of Cybercrime in Financial Services,"  was also published in Service Science.

Our paper, "A Game Theory Model of Cybersecurity Investments with Information Asymmetry," Anna Nagurney and Ladimer S. Nagurney,  is now in press in Netnomics.

Also, our paper,  "A Supply Chain Game Theory Framework for Cybersecurity Investments Under Network Vulnerability,"  Anna Nagurney, Ladimer S. Nagurney, and Shivani Shukla, is in press in the book: Computation, Cryptography, and Network Security (2015), N.J. Daras and M.T. Rassias, Editors, Springer, New York. Since The Washington Post article expands on the challenges faced by encryption, especially in the early years of the Internet, this book should be very timely!

Given the importance of cybersecurity, I am delighted that the UMass Amherst  Provost Katherine S. Newman is helping to spearhead a new Cybersecurity Institute at UMass Amherst and, with the interest in the topic at the Isenberg School of Management, the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, and also other schools at UMass Amherst, this is a very exciting initiative!

Congrats to the ChoiceNet Future Internet Architecture Team on the Success of their Tutorial at GEC 21!

Today, I held a review for the midterm exam for students in my Logistics & Transportation class  plus I had office hours, so I could not take part in the GEC21 Conference at the University of Indiana.at which, as I wrote in my blogpost yesterday, our ChoiceNet project team was presenting a two part tutorial.

ChoiceNet is our NSF Future Internet Architecture (FIA) project, which we have been working on for several years now. Our goal in ChoiceNet is to introduce an economy plane for the Internet.

The tutorial is now over with and Professor Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst, with whom I and our colleagues at the University of Kentucky, NCState, and UNC, along with our doctoral students, have been working with, emailed the photos below from the tutorial. There were 53 in attendance.

The two-part tutorial, including the slides can be accessed here and here.

Those on our team who were present at the tutorial are featured below.

Below is the Acknowledgments page from the tutorial:
And for those of you who may be wondering where are the female faces, two of my doctoral students, who are working with me on the project, Sara Saberi and Dong "Michelle" Li are female, but they were busy at UMass Amherst so could not attend the tutorial sessions. We provided feedback on the second part over the summer since the focus there was on the network economics and payments. We have several models of competition in quality and in prices for the FIA, which have been pubslished in a series of our papers.

The Summer Edition of the Supernetwork Center Newsletter is Out

We are delighted to announce that the 2014 summer edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel, the newsletter of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst,  is now available.

As the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, it is always a pleasure to produce this newsletter and to share it with our many center supporters, colleagues, and collaborators.

Its been a very exciting couple of months and, as I always say, it takes a great team to accomplish as much as we manage to do, and to have such an enjoyable time doing it whether it entails research on supply chains,  transportation systems, or the Future Internet Architecture, known as ChoiceNet that we have been researching with funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), giving invited talks around the world, visiting various universities, and/or always mentoring and guiding our students!

The latest  summer edition as well as all of our previous newsletters can be found on the Supernetwork Center newsletter page. These newsletters are available for download in pdf format.

The next edition of The Supernetwork Sentinel will be in the Fall.

Thank you for your support!

Design and Analysis of a Content-oriented Internet

Yesterday,  I marched down the hill from the Isenberg School of Management with my three doctoral students to attend the Distinguished Faculty Lecture given by Professor James Kurose of the Computer Science Department at UMass Amherst.

The title of his lecture, which was given in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center to a standing room audience, was "Design and Analysis of a Content-oriented Internet."

Professor Kurose was introduced by Provost James Staros and Dean Steven Goodwin and our Chancellor, Dr. Subbaswamy,  was in attendance as well as our VCRE Mike Malone.

Professor Kurose began his lecture by saying that he is "A Teacher" and provided us with an overview of the major developments in communications from the telephone to packet switching to the Internet. He emphasized that the Internet is a Network of Networks and, since I founded and direct the Supernetwork Center at UMass,  I liked hearing this very much. Supernetworks are networks of networks and our research at the center has advanced both methodologies and the modeling and solution of applications ranging from multimodal transportation networks to complex supply chains and to now envisioning a Future Internet Architecture (FIA), which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and which we are working on with Co-PIs at multiple universities.  Our FIA is known as ChoiceNet.

Professor Kurose emphasized that "Content is King" and stated that Cisco is predicting that, by 2017, 80-90% of the Internet traffic will be for videos, TV streaming, peer to peer, etc. He noted that consumers don't care where the content comes from as long as we get it.

Everything used to be wired but now there are more wireless devices than wired ones connected to the Internet. There are also millions of access networks - for example, at UMass we would first be connected to that network.

He also spoke about the challenges that Netflix faces and that researchers in the Computer Science Department are working on. Some of my students and I had had a preview of this topic just the day before in my Management Science doctoral seminar on Variational Inequalities, Networks, and Game Theory, since a Computer Science professor and one of his doctoral students have been sitting in this course of mine and it has been terrific to have them. We had heard the day before about how Netflix is unsure of where to position movies (store them) and makes multiple copies in multiple locations - this may reduce the speed of delivery and also add to network congestion plus storage costs - topics I have spoken about.

Afterwards there were great questions, even from our Chancellor - not surprising since he is a physicist!

I commented that the Netflix problem reminded me of a problem in humanitarian logistics (another course that I am teaching this semester) in terms of the positioninng of supplies and also mentioned our FIA project ChoiceNet, which will allow consumers to select not only content but the mode of delivery which could include less congested paths with consumers willing to pay for such enhanced services as we say  "pay with their wallets."

Indeed, in our ChoiceNet project, which we already have multiple papers on, we draw comparisons with supply chain networks and freight delivery systems and recognize the importance of network economics, game theory, and operations research. Professor Kurose, after my comments, did note that I was in OR and mentioned  "facility location." I have a good idea as to how to model the Netflix problem and solve it. He also mentioned that 2 out of the 5 NSF FIA [projects had UMass Amherst contributors, which is wonderful!

After his fabulous talk - clear why he has received multiple teaching awards research recognitions, I took the photo below of him with my doctoral students.

We essentially closed up the reception since there were so many interesting faculty and graduate students to talk to from Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and even Political Science!

Professor Kurose  has been at UMass Amherst for 30 years and over the next 30 we can continue to ask him many questions that his talk inspired.

I remember, back in 2005, sharing the stage with him at the Bowker Auditorium, when both of us were amongst the 12 faculty being recognized with a new award, which is now given annually - the Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity.

Great to have the opportunity for my doctoral students in Management Science to meet him yesterday!

Speaking on Future Internet Architecture at Network Frontier Workshop at Northwestern

First, I hope that all those celebrating had a very pleasant Thanksgiving and for all those who still have journeys ahead of you, I wish you safe and comfortable travels!

Next week, I will be speaking at the Network Frontier Workshop at Northwestern University. This should be a fascinating event and has been organized by Dr. Adilson E. Motter.

The workshop will bring scientists from different disciplines together who are passionate about networks and are contributing to their study and understanding in numerous ways.

The full list of invited speakers can be seen here.

The full program with all speakers' talk titles is available in pdf format here.

After the great TEDx UMass Amherst Professor Speaker Showcase event last Monday at which I spoke on The Traffic Circle of Life I started to prepare my presentation for Northwestern.

I will be speaking next Thursday on "Envisioning a Future Internet Architecture: The Network Economics of ChoiceNet." My presentation is based on our NSF multi-university project: Network Innovation Through Choice. Our great team already has several papers published or in press -- some of which are highlighted below:

A Network Economic Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Choices and Quality Competition, Anna Nagurney, Dong Li, Tilman Wolf, and Sara Saberi, Netnomics 14(1-2): (2013) pp 1-25.

ChoiceNet: Network Innovation Through Choice, George N. Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, James Griffioen, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman Wolf, invited paper for the 17th Conference on Optical Network Design and Modeling (ONDM 2013).

Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture, Tilman Wolf, Jim Griffioen, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, George Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, and Anna Nagurney, in the Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2012, Helsinki, Finland, August 13-17, 2012.

I will be focusing my presentation on one of our most recent papers: A Cournot-Nash–Bertrand Game Theory Model of a Service-Oriented Internet with Price and Quality Competition Among Network Transport Providers, Anna Nagurney and Tilman Wolf, in press in Computational Management Science.

I am very much looking forward to being back at Northwestern!

The Future of the Internet is a la Carte -- Our NSF Project Featured in ACM Tech News

In a recent post, I wrote about our paper on our National Science Foundation (NSF) project on a new architecture for the Internet, called Choicenet. Professor Tilman Wolf of UMass Amherst is presenting our paper "Choice as a Principle in Network Architecture" today at the ACM SIGCOMM conference in Helsinki, Finland.

One of the Co-PIs on our project just informed me that our project is featured in the latest ACM Tech News, in an article with the  catchy title, "The Future of the Internet is ... a la Carte."
 
This NSF project is a collaboration of UMass Amherst with the University of Kentucky, NCState, and the Renaissance Institute, RENCI.

NCState did the latest press release on our project and I now have two doctoral students working on it with us. Our group is also one of five selected for the Future Internet Architecture initiative by NSF, which is very cool.

There is also some coverage of our project and paper by Kurzweil.