ABSTRACT

Different species of malicious software (malware) have been around for quite a while. Add a command and control structure — and here you are: A "cyber army" of hijacked machines waiting for the commands of the so-called "bot herder" ready to serve the master's will. Botnets may be used for distributing spam, for installing additional malware, for information harvesting, for distributed denial of service attacks and for other actions initiated and controlled by the bot herder.

Today, thousands of botnets are well understood. Their actions are observed and in some cases controlled/limited. In addition, experts active in this field argue that there is a very large number of botnets escaping tracking efforts by mechanisms such as frequent reconfiguration and frequent migration of command-and-control structures.

In his keynote, Peter Martini will comment on the challenge of detecting botnets, on aggregation and clustering of similar species of malicious software and on countermeasures used today. He will comment on the relevance of botnet size and the problem of measuring the current size of well-known botnets. Finally, he will comment on legal issues and missing pieces in the fight against botnets: Botnets have come to stay.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Peter Martini is director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics (FKIE) in Wachtberg (near Bonn), Germany. The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is the largest organization of applied research in Europe. With its staff of 300 people, FKIE is proud to be a member of the Fraunhofer organization and the Fraunhofer Group for Defense and Security. In addition, Prof. Martini is head of the Institute of Computer Science 4 at the University of Bonn.

After studying computer science and electrical engineering at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, Peter Martini spent four years as scientific assistant at the Technical University of Aachen. During that time, he finished his Ph.D. in computer science. From 1990 to 1996, Prof. Martini was professor of computer science at the University of Paderborn, Germany, before he changed to Bonn. At the University of Bonn, he established a research group active in the areas of performance engineering, IT security, mobile communication and high speed networks.

From 2003, Prof. Martini was a member of the scientific advisory council of FKIE, from 2005 he chaired this committee until he became director of FKIE in 2010. Prof. Martini's group became widely known from its research in the areas of security in tactical communication systems and countermeasures against botnets. The demystification of the conficker worm was one of the most popular examples of successful research in his group.

Prof Martini is a member of the scientific advisory council of the German MoD.

ABSTRACT

Cooperative communication is becoming a promising technology to increase the channel capacity of wireless networks. The assignment of relay nodes to users plays a critical role to the resulting channel capacity. A significant challenge is how to make the assignment scheme robust to selfish and cheating behavior of users while guaranteeing the social optimal system capacity.

In this keynote, we will present an integrated optimal relay assignment scheme for cooperative networks. To avoid system performance degradation due to selfish relay selections by the users, we propose a payment mechanism for charging the users to induce them to converge to the optimal assignment. To prevent relay nodes from manipulating the relay assignment by reporting transmission powers untruthfully, we propose a payment mechanism to pay them for providing relaying service.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Guoliang (Larry) Xue is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University. He earned a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 1991. His research interests include resource allocation in wireless networks, survivability and security issues in networking, quality of service provisioning, and optimization algorithms for networking problems. He has published over 180 refereed papers in these areas, including over 90 journal papers. He is a recipient of Best Paper Awards at ICC 2011 and Globecom 2007, as well as a Best Paper Runner-up at ICNP 2010. Prof. Xue serves on the editorial boards of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and IEEE Network Magazine. He served as a TPC co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2010, a co-chair of the Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networking Symposium at IEEE ICC 2009, and a general co-chair of IEEE HPSR 2008. He is an IEEE Communication Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-2011 and is an IEEE Fellow.