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Invitees:
Wajahat Hussain (SEECS) ?(may not be able to join); Saqib+; Johari?; Adib?; Fizi Jalil (MYREN); Dr. Charnsak Srisawatsakul+ (Ubru), Les+, Bebo?, Umar
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They have shortlisted candidates for the task of managing the Pakistani MAs.The students will be given a stipend. Now they are in the phase of selecting them. This involves bureaucracy so there will be a little delay. They will get new interns before summer starts, i.e. 6-8 weeks. Till then things will be As of 4/30/2018 They are still waiting for new students. The interns have not joined the lab yet. So the progress is little slow.
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.
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.
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