μPVN

FlowLens classifies flows directly on programmable network switches efficiently, targeting security applications. To cope with the limited hardware resources, we propose aggregation strategies calibrated with Bayesion optimisation. For covert channel detection FlowLens enables a 150 fold increase in monitoring capacity with an accuracy drop of only 3% vs collecting full packet distributions.

FlowLens is yet another uPVN use case, specifically targeting network security. FlowLens was joint work with our colleagues Diogo Barradas, Nuno Santos, and Luis Rodrigues at IST. It has been accepted for presentation at the next Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS). Stay tuned for Diogo’s presentation of this very cool work in Feb 2021!

Despite the physical distances due to the travel restrictions everyone in the word is facing these times, our uPVN team has not missed a single chance over the last few months to stay connected to the amazing network of peer researchers world-wide. In fact, many of us have virtually attended the following top conferences in networking: SIGCOMM’20, ICNP’20, IMC’20, HotNets’20.

Check out the next edition of the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP2020) virtually happening this upcoming week in Madrid. On Thu the 15th, our PhD student, João Amado, will be presenting, through a poster, his ongoing work on improving network intrusion detection with programmable switches.

We are very excited to announce that Fernando Ramos is co-chairing the third edition of the European workshop on P4 (EuroP4), which will be held in conjunction with CoNEXT 2020.

EuroP4 is an annual event organized by the P4 Language Consortium which aims to gather researchers from Europe and from around the world, and to foster the growth of the P4 Community. More detail about this edition can be found on the official webpage at this link.

Prof. Fernando Ramos will be virtually going to INFOCOM’20 to present this very interesting piece of work, done jointly with Max Alaluna and Prof. Nuno Neves, which proposes new primitives to scale and reconfigure virtual networks leveraging on network migration.

The ANRW’20 steering committee has awarded the work of João Amado on Intrusion Detection with Programmable Switches with a Relevant Research Mention for “his contribution to the design of novel solutions for the fast detection of zero-day attacks, without requiring operator knowledge of attack signatures”. João will be presenting his current work and receiving this award at a public virtual ceremony in the next months.

On February the 13th, the uPVN project was presented at the 5th LASIGE workshop in Lisbon. This event is organized every year by the LASIGE research unit at the Department of Informatics of the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon. The workshop brings together many researchers and students of the faculty from different research areas with the aim to disseminate their work to a broader audience and to foster synergies in research. Our members, Duarte Sequeira and Joao Amado, presented their current research work within the framework of uPVN through two posters, respectively, on “Code Merging for Data Plane Virtualization” and on “SPID: Switch-Powered Intrusion Detection”.

Marco Canini, Associate Professor at KAUST, a high-impact researcher in the networking field, has visited us in Lisbon today. The uPVN team had a work meeting with Marco and Luis Pedrosa, Assistant Professor at the IST (Univ. Lisboa) and an expert on network verification and synthesis (Luis is author of some of the most impactful work today on verification of network functions). We discussed the project challenges and brainstormed on these and other topics related to programmable networking. It was a very fruitful discussion, followed by an amazing dinner with very nice traditional Portuguese food (bacalhau!).

A small μPVN team, Salvatore Signorello and Joao Amado, attended the latest P4 hackathon, promoted by the P4 Education Working Group and hosted by KPN in the Netherlands. P4 hackathons are events regularly organized by the P4.org community to promote the exchange among members and disseminate this language our team is very much involved with, as it’s core to the project. These events welcome network practitioners from both academia and industry. This time the event featured presentations in the morning to share technology advances (by Barefoot), introduce the language (by AAGlenn Internetworking Company) and develop Proofs of Concept in P4 (KPN), and hands-on sessions in the afternoon for the participants to work together on small P4 projects. It has been a great experience for us to exchange ideas with other participants, disseminate our research work and strengthen our idea that a platform to virtualize P4-programmable data planes is a tool of immediate need for a wide audience.

The 2nd European workshop on P4 was held in Cambridge, UK, jointly with the IEEE ANCS conference. Fernando Ramos, PI of the uPVN project, co-chaired the Program Committee of the workshop. Salvatore has also presented our work on network coding using P4, one of the use cases of the project.