Page History

No intern has joined Wajahat's Lab. So there is not much progress.

Wajahat proposes to get a list of the new Universities in Pakistan and contact them encouraging them to participate in PingER and set up MA. They have made a list of new university sites, communications networks, Labs in different regions of Pakistan (especially the remote regions) and will make contact.

• The list of new universities is ready. Just need resource to engage them. 
• Unsure how this is affected by lack of interns.

Wajahat is hoping to get few students to work on Master thesis related to pinger data. If possible kindly share ideas related to data analytics which he can share with students

• Suggestions anyone?

 Wajahat also asked:

•  “Has any work gone into to predicting the cause of failures(black out, flood, coup (turkey)) using pinger data?”
• Les> there have been several case studies looking at the impacts of failures, however nothing on predicting failures. I am not sure how one might  use PinGER to predict the cause of a failure. For some cases (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, flood, coup), it is unclear to me how Network performance monitoring could add to other means of predicting the cause.
• Wajahat's thinking is along the lines of "Regarding other sources, I was thinking, internet is the pulse of digital world. Other sources require additional setup that might not be a possibility in developing countries. Internet being a necessity and having other uses is still prevalent in these developing countries. Can it be used as a real time sensor."
• Again I am  forwarding the question in case others in the team may have some suggestions?

There is an upcoming grant call for projects between Pakistan and the US. Topics may be focused on cybersecurity, health, and education. It has not been announced yet. Wajahat will get the details and share them with the team as soon as they are available. It is interesting since getting a US partner appears to be a roadblock for many potential Pakistani responders. However, the topics may not be very related to PingER. NUST is looking at applying to set up a cyber lab. Getting the funding will be in competition with other Pakistani Universities. For cyber the main things we could think of from PingER were: quantifying what fraction of hosts block pings, punching holes in firewalls to allow pings, how to misuse ping (e.g. ping-of-death, or using anomalous ping packets to deduce the OS etc. flood pings for DOS), the host can respond to ping but applications do not work.  Fear of misuse of pings can result in the system administrator, network administrator or cybersecurity blocking pings. A possibility might be a study of what fraction of say working www/dns etc. apps (i.e. checking if a host responds to the relevant port) do not respond to pings.  This could be by application, by country or by region etc.  Also how to protect a remote pinger traceroute or server from being used in DOS attacks. As of 3/27/2018 there is no call so far. There was one last year, so Wajahat is expecting one. Emailed Wajahar 6/3/2018 asking for update. He responded "There is no call yet. There was one last year. May be change in the US-Pak policy. Just a guess."

There is an upcoming grant call for projects between Pakistan and the US. Topics may be focused on cybersecurity, health, and education. It has not been announced yet. Wajahat will get the details and share them with the team as soon as they are available. It is interesting since getting a US partner appears to be a roadblock for many potential Pakistani responders. However, the topics may not be very related to PingER. NUST is looking at applying to set up a cyber lab. Getting the funding will be in competition with other Pakistani Universities. For cyber the main things we could think of from PingER were: quantifying what fraction of hosts block pings, punching holes in firewalls to allow pings, how to misuse ping (e.g. ping-of-death, or using anomalous ping packets to deduce the OS etc. flood pings for DOS), the host can respond to ping but applications do not work.  Fear of misuse of pings can result in the system administrator, network administrator or cybersecurity blocking pings. A possibility might be a study of what fraction of say working www/dns etc. apps (i.e. checking if a host responds to the relevant port) do not respond to pings.  This could be by application, by country or by region etc.  Also how to protect a remote pinger traceroute or server from being used in DOS attacks. As of 3/27/2018 there is no call so far. There was one last year, so Wajahat is expecting one. Emailed Wajahar 6/3/2018 asking for update. He responded "There is no call yet. There was one last year. May be change in the US-Pak policy. Just a guess."

Discussion items

Wajahat is hoping to get few students to work on Master thesis related to pinger data. If possible kindly share ideas related to data analytics which he can share with students

• Suggestions anyone?

 Wajahat also asked:

•  “Has any work gone into to predicting the cause of failures(black out, flood, coup (turkey)) using pinger data?”
• Les> there have been several case studies looking at the impacts of failures, however nothing on predicting failures. I am not sure how one might  use PinGER to predict the cause of a failure. For some cases (e.g. earthquakes, tsunamis, flood, coup), it is unclear to me how Network performance monitoring could add to other means of predicting the cause.
• Wajahat's thinking is along the lines of "Regarding other sources, I was thinking, internet is the pulse of digital world. Other sources require additional setup that might not be a possibility in developing countries. Internet being a necessity and having other uses is still prevalent in these developing countries. Can it be used as a real time sensor."
• Again I am forwarding the question in case others in the team may have some suggestions?