News

Talk by Pavlos Nikolopoulos

Pavlos Nikolopoulos who is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Computer & Communication Sciences working with the NAL lab at EPFL and the ARNI lab at UCLA, will give a talk on "Traffic receipts for network transparency" on Tuesday, February 18th, at room 414 of the Trias str. building of the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB)

Talk abstract: Today's Internet is not transparent: when packets get lost or delayed, there is typically no information about where the problem occurred, hence no information about who is responsible. This results in Internet service providers (ISPs) offering service level agreements (SLAs) that cannot be verified, and governments enacting neutrality regulations that cannot be enforced. To remedy this, we propose a "network transparency system," where each participating network emits receipts for a small sample of packets it observes; an independent monitor collects these receipts and makes decisions regarding the network’s performance and neutrality (or lack thereof). Sampling is a good building block for this system, because it enables a solution that is flexible and combines low resource cost with quantifiable accuracy. The challenge we face is misbehavior: a network that participates in such a system has a clear incentive to game the system and influence the monitor’s decisions to its advantage, by manipulating either the receipts it emits or the corresponding sampled traffic. In this talk, I will present a new packet-sampling algorithm that is provably robust to such misbehavior, enables network-performance estimation with quantifiable accuracy, and requires only minimal resources.

Presenter's biography: Pavlos Nikolopoulos is a postdoctoral researcher in Computer & Communication Sciences working with the NAL lab at EPFL and the ARNI lab at UCLA. His main research interests lie at the intersection of network security, system design and statistics, with a focus on Network Transparency and Blockchain systems. He received his PhD from EPFL under the supervision of Professor Katerina Argyraki, and his MSc in Informatics & Telecommunications from the University of Athens, Greece. Before starting at EPFL in 2012, he worked for several years as a telecom engineer for the Greek Air Force.