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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 resources to engage them.
- Students were assigned last week. They will need some training and hope to start soon.
- Les pointed out that several Pakistani MAs have been disabled, i.e. the data is no longer gathered from them.
- Wajahat will provide a list of working or potentially working Pakistani MAs to Les, and if they are not enabled, Les will enter or re-enable the gathering of data from these MAs.
Wajahat says (7/10/2018): "I was discussing the blockchain related email that you sent earlier with Dr. Taha (security researcher at SEECS NUST). He was excited about it. He wanted to try a few things and had a few queries which I was not able to answer. He might join us in our future meetings." Dr Taha joined us for the meeting and the discussion follows:
- Dr Taha joined this meeting. He has been working with BlockChain (BC) for 3-4 years and recently heard of Pinger
- He wondered about our interest in BC, since there does not appear to be a strong security interest. It appears to be mainly a storage issue. BC may be a hinderance since the data will be replicated.
- Bebo said the interest is more in the way of a de-centralized system to reduce the dependence on SLAC.
- The proof of work is nothing like as complex as it is for cryptocurrency.
- There are file storage technologies that are distributed but all the data is not at all the sites. In particular the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System) was mentioned. There is a draft paper.
- Saqib recently presented a paper (to be published) that used the IPFS and BC to handle issues in the current PingER architecture. Saqib's mobile connection was very poor so he provided the overview below:
- In this paper, we proposed nearly the same idea as you mentioned in our last skype meeting. We proposed to store the metadata of PingER measurements on the Blockchain whereas actual data is stored off-chain using IPFS file system.
- For redundancy, we stored the data of each MA at 3 different locations (links of them are stored in BC) so that it can be successfully retrieved in case the target MA is offline.
- We already have a set of 50+ MAs, we are thinking of utilizing them as a peer in BC network.
- We are more inclined towards the use of permissioned blockchain (currently our focus is Hyperledger Fabric) where consensus is not computational expensive as peers are pre-authenticated.
This is just an initial idea. I am looking forward to having your comments and feedback.
MIT has been working on a system using IPFS together with a revocation capability (e.g. for student degrees/diplomas).
PingER does not have a need for revocation or editing of data.
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