University of Twente (UT)

Partner description

The University of Twente (UT) is an entrepreneurial research university, located in the east of the Netherlands. Focus points include Telematics; research in this area is organized within the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT). The CTIT is one of the largest academic ICT research institutes in Europe. About 450 researchers (250 fte) actively participate in the CTIT and the yearly budget amounts to 30 ME. The integration of technology-based research and its application in specific domains has become a clear focus of CTIT. Within CTIT, 28 research groups from 4 faculties joined forces: the spectrum ranges from primarily technology-oriented towards highly application-oriented. CTIT has bundled its research activities into six important ICT themes: Dependable Systems & Networks, Wireless and Sensor Systems, Security & Privacy, Natural Interaction in Computer-mediated Environments, Service architectures & software infrastructures for health, Industrial Engineering & ICT.

The institute maintains an extensive international network of contacts and working relations with academia and industry. CTIT research leads to approx. 5-7 spin-off companies per year. CTIT initiated the establishment of the Netherlands Institute for Research on ICT (NIRICT), which bundles the ICT research activities of the three Universities of Technology in the Netherlands. As such it is also one of the founding fathers of EIT.ICT Labs, which started end of 2009, in which NIRICT is one of the academic partners. CTIT has long-term experience in participating to European Framework projects (since FP2) and has a track record in managing and coordinating European Framework and national projects. The CTIT group that participates in this project is the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems (DACS) group. DACS focuses on dependable networked systems (wired, wireless and embedded). DACS contributes to the design and implementation of such systems, as well as to methods and techniques to support the design, dimensioning and management of such systems.The DACS group is active in the field of network monitoring and management and it is currently leading the EU FP7 Network of Excellence FLAMINGO; in the past DACS has been involved, among others, in the EU Network of Excellence EMANICS and in the EU projects Univerself, COST TMA, and the national projects MIDAS and Sequal.

As a Collaborating Institution in mPlane, UT will contribute with its expertise in network monitoring and management, with a focus on network security. In particular, UT is currently focusing its research on measurements for large-scale security events, such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, security in DNS/DNSSEC. UT is also regularly collaborating with ISP such as SURFnet in the context of measurements and security.

Role in mPlane

UT will be mainly involved in the following WPs:

• WP2 - Programmable Probes: UT will deploy mPlane probes in the campus network and test them, thus providing feedback to the project. Estimation of the allocated effort: approximately 1 PM
• WP5: Integration, Deployment, Data Collection, and Evaluation: UT will collaborate to WP5 by deploying mPlane probes, in particular tstat. UT will also collaborate by providing access to collected data for specific research tasks. Estimation of the allocated effort: approximately 1 PM

Key Personnel

Prof.dr.ir A. Pras is full professor in the area of Network Operations and Management at
DACS Group. In 1995 he received a Ph.D. degree for his thesis titled "Network
Management Architectures". His research interests include network management technologies, network monitoring and measurements, and network security. He is the coordinator of the European Network of Excellence on Management of the Future Internet (FLAMINGO), coordinator of the EU Future Internet Cluster and has participated in many European and Dutch research projects, as member, evaluator and as reviewer. He has contributed to research and standardization activities as a founding member of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Network Management Research Group (NMRG) and as RFC author. He is chairing the IFIP Technical Committee 6 on"Communications Systems", is editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine series on "Network & Service Management", associate editor of the International Journal of Network Management (IJNM), and Editorial Advisory Board member for the Journal of Network and Systems Management (JNSM). He is Steering Committee member of the IFIP/IEEE NOMS and IM Symposia (NISC), CNSM, AIMS, FUNEMS, as well as the EUNICE Consortium. His recent PhD students in the area of network security include Giovane Moura (“Internet Bad Neighborhoods”), Rafael Barbosa (“SCADA security”), Rick Hofstede (“Autonomic flow-based Anomaly Detection”), Jair Santanna (“DNS-based DDOS attacks”) and Luuk Hendriks.

Dr. A. Sperotto is post-doctoral researcher in the area of Network Monitoring and Network Security at the DACS Group, University of Twente, NL. She received a Ph.D. degree from the same university in 2010, with a thesis titled “Flow- based Intrusion Detection”, and she hold a MSc degree (cum laude) and BSc degree (cum laude) from the Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. Her research interests include traffic monitoring and analysis, and network security. She is currently WP-leader in the European Network of Excellence on Management of the Future Internet (FLAMINGO), leading the Work Package on “Network and Service Monitoring”. She is involved with the IRTF Network Management Research Group (NMRG), and one of the papers she has co-authored has been awarded with the Awarded with the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize 2013. She is regularly involved as TPC member of conferences such as IFIP/IEEE IM/NOMS and AIMS, and she is currently TPC Co-Chair of AIMS 2014. She has recently been visiting researcher at Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), University of California, San Diego, USA.