Program

Schedule        Keynotes          Posters

We are very excited with the program. We received 41 talk proposals, which attests to the quality and breath of research being done in the region. With these, will have 14 lightning talks and a poster session with the majority of the other submissions. The program features three keynotes, plus lightning 10-minute talks from both academics and industry practitioners. The format is designed to foster discussion and strengthen the local networking and systems community.

Time Speaker Title
8:00-9:00 Check-in, poster set up
9:00-9:10 Opening Remarks
9:10-10:00  Mohammad Alizadeh (Cisco/MIT) Packet Transport Mechanisms for Data Center Networks
10:00-10:20 Break 
10:20-11:10  Lightning Talks Networking and Clouds
Session chair: Rodrigo Fonseca
10:20 Jonathan Perry (MIT) Moira: Time-Based Packet Scheduling
10:30 Ki Suh Lee (Cornell) PHY Covert Channels: Can you see the Idles?
10:40 Ali Musa Iftikhar (Tufts) Towards Predictable and Resilient Multi-Tenant Data Centers
10:50 Jonathan Mace (Brown) Towards General-Purpose Resource Management in Shared Cloud Services
11:00 Peter Desnoyers (NEU) The Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC)
11:10-11:40 Break
11:40-12:20 Keynotes Round 2 Session chair: Alan Mislove
11:40-12:00 Xia Zhou Networking in the Light
12:00-12:20 Phillipa Gil Targeted Threat Index: Characterizing and Quantifying Politically-Motivated Targeted Malware
12:20-1:30  Lunch
1:30-2:10 Lightning Talks Security and Privacy
Session chair: Sharon Goldberg
1:30 Ethan Heilman (BU) From the consent of the routed: improving the transparency of the RPKI
1:40 Trishank Kuppusamy (NYU Poly) Mercury: Scalable security for software distribution on community repositories
1:50 Alina Oprea (RSA) Detecting advanced threats by mining large-scale log data
2:00 James Mickens (MSR) Private Browsing Semantics Without Browser Assistance
2:10-3:40  Poster Session
3:30-4:30  Lightning Talks Energy and Mobile
Session chair: Dave Choffnes
3:40 Abhigyan Sharma (UMass Amherst) Shrink: A Cluster Manager for Greening Content Datacenters
3:50 Guru Srinivasa (Buffalo) Using Inefficiency to Manage Energy on Power-Agile Devices
4:00 Jennie Steshenko (UMass Amherst) Mobility in a large scale WiFi network: from syslog events to mobile user sessions to anonymized mobility traces
4:10 Tiffany Chen (MIT) Glimpse: Accurate and Efficient Object Recognition Applications on Mobile Devices
4:20 Arash Molavi Kakhki (Northestern) Identifying Traffic Differentiation on Cellular Data Networks
~5:30 Get-together  See the NENS’14 Bar List! (This is not sponsored, but should be fun!)

Keynotes

  • Mohammad Alizadeh
    Packet Transport Mechanisms for Data Center Networks
    We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the computing landscape in recent years as much of the world’s application workloads move to massive cloud data centers. These data centers enable the services we rely on daily, such as web search, social networking, and Internet commerce. They also require huge investments to deploy and operate. This has spurred significant interest in the industry and the research community in data centers, and in particular, in data center networks.
    A crucial feature of a data center network is its transport mechanism: the method by which data is transferred from one server to another. Ideally, this should occur at the highest possible rate and with the lowest possible latency. But there is an inherent tension between these requirements, especially with today’s state-of-the-art Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) in data centers. In this talk, I will present three new data center transport designs, with increasing levels of sophistication, that we have developed over the last several years. First, I will describe Data Center TCP (DCTCP), a new congestion control algorithm for data centers that is now shipping with Windows Server 2012. DCTCP uses a simple modification to the TCP algorithm to achieve full throughput while reducing queueing latency in the switches by ~10x compared to TCP. I will then discuss HULL, an architecture that builds on DCTCP to deliver near-zero fabric latency: only propagation and switching latency, no queueing. Finally, I will describe pFabric, a minimalistic design that leverages application-level hints and very simple switch mechanisms to achieve near theoretically optimal scheduling of flows across the data center fabric.
  • Phillipa Gil
    Targeted attacks on civil society and non-governmental organizations have gone underreported despite the fact that these organizations have been shown to be frequent targets of these attacks. In this talk, I will shed light on targeted malware attacks faced by these organizations by presenting our study of malicious e-mails received by 10 civil society organizations (the majority of which are from groups related to China and Tibet issues) over a period of 4 years.
    Our study highlights important properties of malware threats faced by these organizations with implications on how these organizations defend themselves and how we quantify these threats.  We find that the technical sophistication of malware we observe is fairly low, with more effort placed on socially engineering the e-mail content. Based on this observation, we develop the Targeted Threat Index (TTI), a metric which incorporates both social engineering and technical sophistication when assessing the risk of malware threats. We demonstrate that this metric is more effective than simple technical sophistication for identifying malware threats with the highest potential to successfully compromise victims. We also discuss how education efforts focused on changing user behaviour can help prevent compromises.
  • Xia Zhou
    Networking in the Light
    Mobile computing is accelerating beyond the smartphone era. The advent of new wearables (e.g., Google Glass, Samsung smart watch, Fitbit) and health sensors (e.g., biometric sensors printed onto the skin) is placing significant new demands on the already limited radio spectrum. Within the next two years, the volume of data from mobile devices will surpass all data generated by wired networks. To stave off the radio spectrum crunch, there is a need for radically different thinking.
    In this talk, I will discuss the potential of using visible light spectrum to mitigate the radio spectrum crunch problem. Operating on the 400THz – 800THz unregulated frequency band, visible light spectrum offers 10,000 times more bandwidth than the total radio spectrum, and many other unique benefits. I will first describe our recent effort on enabling unobtrusive communication between screens/displays and cameras, a special form of Visible Light Communication (VLC). Without using any coded images, our system creates a hidden channel to interconnect screens and cameras, and to transmit dynamic data on the fly using off-the-shelf smart devices. I will also discuss our vision on leveraging VLC to build the next-generation smart spaces, and new networking and systems challenges it brings.

Posters

We received a large number of excellent submissions, and have invited the following talk proposals to present their work as posters. The posters should be assembled in the morning, and will be displayed until the end of the day.

  • Software-Defined Inbound Traffic Engineering for Enterprises Authors: Peng Sun, Nanxi Kang, Jennifer Rexford, and Laurent Vanbever (Princeton University)
  • Software Fallbacks for Best-effort Hardware Transactional Memory Authors: Irina Calciu (Brown University)
  • Characterizing SMR drives Authors: Abutalib Aghayev and Peter Desnoyers (Northeastern University)
  • Measurement and Modeling of User Transitioning Among Networks Authors: Sookhyun Yang, Jim Kurose, Simon Heimlicher, and Arun Venkataramani (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
  • Millisecond-scale Monitoring and Control for Commodity Networks Authors: Jeff Rasley (Brown University)
  • Identifying and Analyzing High Impact Routing Events with PathMiner Authors: Giovanni Comarela and Mark Crovella (Boston University)
  • A Concurrent Priority Queue with Elimination and Combining Authors: Hammurabi Mendes, Irina Calciu, and Maurice Herlihy (Brown University)
  • WiFi, LTE, or Both? Measuring Multi-Homed Wireless Internet Performance Authors: Shuo Deng, Ravi Netravali, Anirudh Sivaraman, and Hari Balakrishnan (MIT CSAIL)
  • Designing a dual purpose indoor illumination and optical communication system. Authors: Pankil Butala and Thomas D. C. Little (Boston University and NSF Smart Lighting ERC)
  • BetrFS: Moving in the Write Direction Authors: William Jannen, Jun Yuan, Yang Zhan, Amogh Akshintala, Yizheng Jiao, Ankur Mittal, Prashant Pandey, Phaneendra Reddy, and Michael Bender (Stony Brook University), Martin Farach-Colton (Rutgers), Rob Johnson (Stony Brook University), Bradley C. Kuszmaul (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Donald E. Porter (Stony Brook University)
  • Linux XIA: A Sandbox for Collaborative Network Innovation Authors: Michel Machado, John W. Byers, and Cody Doucette (Boston University)
  • Optical Delusions: A Study of Malicious QR Codes in the Wild Authors: amin kharraz, Engin Kirda, and William Robertson (Northeastern University) and Davide Balzarotti and Aurélien Francillon (Institut Eurecom)
  • How Secure and Quick is QUIC in Presence of Malice? Authors:Robert Lychev (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Alexandra Boldyreva (Georgia Tech) and Cristina Nita-Rotaru (Purdue)
  • Tsumiki: A Meta-Platform for Building Your Own Testbed Authors: Justin Cappos (NYU)
  • Resource Allocation Mechanisms for Predictable Execution of Resource Allocation Mechanisms for Predictable Execution of Brokered Workloads in Virtualized Environments Authors: Christine Bassem and Azer Bestavros (Boston University)
  • Monitoring and Analysis of Collection Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks with Intra-Vehicular Applications Authors: Wei Si, Morteza Hashemi, David Starobinski, and Ari Trachtenberg (Boston University)
  • Tierless Programming and Reasoning for Software-Defined Networks Authors: Tim Nelson, Andrew D. Ferguson, Da Yu, Shriram Krishnamurthi, and Rodrigo Fonseca (Brown University)
  • Crowdsourcing Access Network Spectrum Allocation Using Smartphones Authors: Jinghao Shi (University at Buffalo)
  • Embracing Uncertainty in Smartphone Programming Authors: Geoffrey Challen (University at Buffalo)
  • The PocketLocker Personal Cloud Storage SystemAuthors: Anandatirtha N, Geoffrey Challen, and Carl Nuessle (University at Buffalo) and Emiliano Miluzzo and Robin Chen (AT&T Labs Research)
  • PolyPasswordHasher: No single password is left behind Authors: Santiago Torres-Arias and Justin Cappos (New York University)
  • Charging for Services in an SDN-Based Network Authors: Xinming Chen and Tilman Wolf (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
  • ZipPhone: Preserving Location Privacy without Carrier Cooperation Authors: Keen Sung, Brian Neil Levine, and Marc Liberatore (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
  • Lind: A Portable Lightweight Single-Process Sandbox Authors: Yiwen Li and Justin Cappos (New York University, Polytechnic School of Engineering)
  • Networking challenges in a multi-provider Hardware as a Service (HaaS) Authors: Somaya Arianfar and Andreas Voellmy (Cisco systems)
  • Hardware as a Service (HaaS) Authors: Jason Hennessey (BU), Chris Hill (MIT), Ian Denhardt (BU), Viggnesh Venugopal (NEU), George Silvis and Orran Krieger (BU), and Peter Desnoyers (NEU)