Nikolai Sultana
Illinois Institute of Technology, IL·Computer Science
Network testbeds are shared platforms where researchers rent hardware to run networking experiments. The equipment is now highly programmable, including smart network cards and software switches, and it is reconfigured constantly as users come and go.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
network testbeds
programmable networks
data plane attestation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Develop remote data-plane attestation for P4-programmable network devices, generating verifiable evidence of their running program and state, with tunable trade-offs between integrity assurance and computing overhead.
- Build programmable network provenance that gives testbed users trustworthy records of past network configurations for establishing ground truth, troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.
- Create user-centric views with filters and faceted queries that show verified equipment state and the paths network flows took on testbeds such as FABRIC.
More about the research
That flexibility makes it hard to know what state the network was actually in at any moment. If researchers cannot verify that state, they cannot fully trust or reproduce their results. This project, a collaboration among Illinois Institute of Technology, SRI International and Georgetown University, is building a research instrument to observe and verify these fast, scattered changes.
Why it matters
Experiments on shared programmable network testbeds are hard to verify and repeat when the underlying network keeps changing. Trustworthy records of network state could make results on platforms like FABRIC more reliable and reproducible. Open-source attestation and provenance tools could also help testbed operators troubleshoot faults faster.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Paul Ruth
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Computer Science
Deploy next-generation SmartNICs, programmable network cards called Data Processing Units, at four international FABRIC testbed sites so researchers can offload networking, storage and security tasks from CPUs and GPUs.
Xiaokang Qiu
Purdue University, IN·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop program synthesis algorithms that infer objective functions, library models and task decomposition themselves, so programmers need not hand-craft them, enabling scalable library-based synthesis.
Dong Jin
University of Arkansas, AR·Computer Science
Build an in-network cyberattack detection system for power-grid communication networks that uses programmable data planes for high-speed, customizable packet inspection.
The school
Illinois Institute of Technology: 5 labs on PI Pages, $38M a year on research, 76 research doctorates a year.
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