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Contact Address A44 Computing Department Infolab21, Lancaster University LA1 4WA United Kingdom Email : a.ali3@lancaster[dot]ac{dot}uk a.ali@comp[dot]lancs{dot}ac[dot]uk |
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PhD Candidate 2009 - 2013 |
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Links General Infolab21, Lancaster,Computing Resilience ResumeNet, Resilinet (Wiki, slide), Security Team-Cymru, Impact Alliance, Research SSFNet, OMNET++, Ponder2, GPENI (Doc), VINI, GENI, EMULAB, IntraNet Resilience , WIKi , Intranet Journals ACM (ACM Library.) Alan Bundy’s, Research skills. NSRC,ICON , ISC, APIA, APRICOT ,IRTF, INTERNET2, FIRE, NoF, APNIC,FutureInternet
Sponsors
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“Network Resilience” |
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Publication & Other Works
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About Me
I am a PhD Candidate at The Computing Department of Lancaster University. I started reading for a PhD degree in October 2009, supervised by Prof. David Hutchison. I obtained My masters Degree in Computer Science from National University of Malaysia (UKM) in 2008 while still working with Telekom Malaysia. I am an alumni of University of Kent at Canterbury,UK, where I completed my BEng in Computer Systems Engineering (CSE) in 1999. I also hold a diploma in Software Engineering from the Institute of Telecommunication and Information Technology (ITTM) . Currently I am fully sponsored by Yayasan Khazanah (National Treasury Foundation) to do a PhD in Network Resilience. My Career I dont really have a strong Research background but it will be my new Interest from now on. I chose to make a turn in 2009 after being in Industries since 1999. I started my career with Telekom Malaysia’s ISP-(TMNET) (from 1999 until 2009) and had assumed many roles ranging from Network Engineer, Security Engineer, Field Support Engineer, Network Architect, Operation Manager, Datacenter Manager, until my last role as Project Manager. It is probably laughable for some of you, but I have enjoyed every minutes of my work (except when facing the angry Telekom top customers for every second their link went down). Perhaps, due to this enthusiasm, my project (Next Generation Datacenter) was nominated as finalist in Best Security Strategy in MIS IT Excellence award in Singapore 2008. I was also one of the recipient for TM Group CEO Merit Award in 2007 in recognition to my outstanding contribution throughout my service. My work (and study) has brought me to travel to quite number a places (despite my shallow pocket) to countries like Australia, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, USA, Canada, Indonesia and Europe. I spent a few months in Riyadh as part of consultancies project in 2008. One unique aspect of my career was, that I have got many opportunities to learn about many aspects of Telecommunication, from physical (ie cabling) to sales and marketing, from PC and DSL modem to MultiGigabit routers and Switches, From LAN to Backbone and Complex Routing Protocol, from Conception (Design) to Inception (Development and Operation), and at times, I also had to view things from technological to economical perspective and even to the extend of the politics behind it. My main focus of interest however, was always on the technology. I was professionally trained and has experienced many technology from Cisco, Juniper, 3Com, Alcatel to many other security and network management systems and product, commercial of open source. In my early career, I was known by the name gatekeeper due to my role as the key contact person for Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). I was involved in the proposal and design stage of our IX and Datacenter Network and initiated the application of Internet Resources (AS and IP addresses) for this network. Gatekeeper was a brand name for TM’s (or Malaysian) first Internet Exchange, a hub that was built to interconnect ISPs in Malaysia. The project has now evolved into different name such as MyIX and MiX (I kinna mixed up about its name) , but thank god, in the end Malaysia has got its Internet Exchange (where Telekom Malaysia is one of the providers), which now enables local ISPs, NSPs or even ASPs to enjoy better Internet Performance. Thanks to the initiatives from the Malaysia Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) as the coordinator in which I was also involved as part of the Technical Steering committee (Representing TMNet) in the early stage of IX development.
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When The Going gets Tough, The toughs get going |
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Research Interest
I am particularly interested in Networking and Security. It has been part and parcel of my career and everything I have known for the past 10 years. I have continuing love for programming and have been doing some scripting and programming to assist me with my work. I enjoy learning and exploring variety of technology but will not settle to be just the end user of technology. I want to Invent something, innovate, create and develop solution, for the betterment of the Future Internet and Telecommunication. Some might easily relate my research interest to security. As much as I fancy this terminology, I am quite reserve with the security genre and would be settled with the term resilience. In my opinion, security is always vague and is a never ending story. In fact it could be a ’dangerous’ topic for my PhD and has the tendencies to make me dive into oblivion. It will invite more questions than answers and this is at least true when I was applying VISA to the USA..:) As my background suggested, I came to know quite many of the problems in Network Operation. In fact, as an official contact for Internet Resource, I received many complaints from Internet users, organization, business and government from around the world who wish to complain or seek cooperation to act upon any abusive activities conducted using our IP addresses. The like of spam, DDoS attacks, hacking, Fraud, Phishing are among the popular complaints. Some have gone to the extend of taking a legal action against “me” as I am the only known, obvious stakeholder. But, while most of the cases could be resolved (or passified) by mean of a strong company policy, or through the services term and condition, (ie the company have the right to refuse the suspicious users by temporarily disconnecting or barring them from the service), two, perhaps most disturbing activities on the Internet nowadays are the Botnet and Distributed Denial of Services. I am currently looking into DDoS Remediation (as part of Resilience Strategy) by exploring any novel approach that can help to provide remediation, automatically and autonomously. (but this is still too early) To understand further, my Links on the left column would probably give you some idea on what I am trying to achieve. But a much simpler analogy of Distributed Denial of service is like having a baby and 2 other kids while doing your PhD (at least in my case). Sometimes they could ‘deny you from achieving some level of performance’ . A request for attention, might not only coming from the baby, but his sister and brother as well (read Distributed) ...But you don't really want to think about getting rid of them or your work (do you?). Because you can’t (unless you are insane..).. So you need to find ways on how to be more resilience and persistent in your work to ensure they are not holding you back with the requests (read attack). So, the best possible way is to deal with it with high readiness, alert and extra caution by probably imposing set of rules or policy for your work and family or by preparing resources such as toys, snack, food, game, tv (read remedy) as countermeasures. So that, when the overwhelming request come in sudden (read ‘attacks’) you know immediately what to do and how to do it quickly. Even better, if the kids can service themselves (read autonomously) without bothering you.
Latest ‘Attack’ (read baby in picture) came to my world on 07/08/09 , a month before I began My PhD journey. The only difference is that, this attack was much more welcomed than the attack on the network infrastructure. In our definition this is close to a flash crowd (legitimate but overwhelming traffic)
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About Resilience
The Internet is an increasingly attractive target to recreational crackers, industrial espionage, terrorists, and information warfare. We define resilience as the ability of the network to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation. This service includes the ability for users and applications to access information when needed (e.g., Web browsing and sensor monitoring), the maintenance of end-to-end communication association (e.g., tele- and video conferences), and the operation of distributed processing and networked storage. The challenges that may impact normal operation include: [1] unintentional misconfiguration or operational mistakes; [2] large-scale natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, ice storms, tsunami, floods); [3] malicious attacks from intelligent adversaries against the network hardware, software, or protocol infrastructure including DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks; [4] environmental challenges of mobility, weak channels , and unpredictably long delay; [5] unusual but legitimate traffic load such as a flash crowds Our definition of resilience is therefore a superset of commonly used definitions for survivability, dependability, and fault tolerance. |
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“Justifying a Policy Based Approach for DDoS Remediation: A Case Study” ,Azman Ali, Alberto Schaeffer-Filho, Paul Smith and David Hutchison Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK, 11th Annual Conference on the Convergence of Telecommunications, Networking & Broadcasting (PGNet 2010), Liverpool, UK, 21-22 June 2010.
“The Next Generation Network and Resilience A Case Study”, Azman Ali ,Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK. The UK-Malaysian-Ireland Engineering Science Conference 2010 (UMIES 2010) University of Queen, Belfast,UK, 23-25 June 2010 .
“Strategies for Network Resilience: Capitalising on Policies”, Paul Smith1, Alberto Schaefer-Filho1,Azman Ali1, Marcus Scholler2,Nizar Kheir3, Andreas Mauthe1 and David Hutchison1 1 Computing Department, Lancaster University, UK 2 NEC Laboratories Europe, Heidelberg, Germany 3 France Telecom R&D Caen, 14066 CAEN, France 4th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2010) June 21-25, 2010, University of Zurich, Switzerland
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