Virtual Network Configuration Research Articles

Empowering Network Security through Advanced Analysis of Malware Samples: Leveraging System Metrics and Network Log Data for Informed Decision-Making

AbstractIn the never-ending battle against rising malware threats, cybersecurity professionals were constantly challenged by malware researchers. Businesses and institutions that have fallen prey to these threats that have suffered significant financial losses and enormous disruption to countless lives. As a result, security approaches have evolved to include preemptive measures such as the widespread use of HoneyPots. However, data-driven decision-making was required to improve the effectiveness of such approaches. Therefore, this paper describes a quantitative analysis that assesses various malware samples using system metrics and network log data. The goal is to properly visualise this information and analyse if it can aid in decision-making processes, ultimately leading to the construction of more robust and secure networks. To help with this research, a dashboard application was created that allows the installation of virtual machines, the configuration of virtual networks, and the collection of system metric data from outside sources. The findings of this paper can help greatly improve network security and stay ahead of threats in the cat-and-mouse game.

Ecosystem Construction of International Chinese Language Education Meta-Universe in the Internet Era

Abstract With the development of Internet technology, international Chinese language education has ushered in new challenges and opportunities. Constructing a global Chinese education ecosystem based on the concept of meta-universe not only improves the quality and efficiency of teaching and learning, but also expands the boundaries of education and provides learners with a richer and more immersive learning experience. The study first proposes a new virtual network configuration algorithm, which aims to optimize resource allocation and improve the carrying capacity of the network. Experimental results show that the new algorithm improves the number of virtual network bearers by 30% and network resource utilization by 25% compared to the traditional method. Further, the study uses deep reinforcement learning techniques to optimize dynamic resource allocation, and the results show that the resource allocation efficiency of the system is improved by 20% in the meta-universe education application scenario. In addition, the study also explored the information literacy of international Chinese language education students. The survey analysis found that the students’ information literacy scores averaged 69.78%, with the scores for the dimensions of information awareness, information knowledge, and information competence being 74.6%, 60.07%, and 66.53%, respectively. This indicates that although students’ information awareness is relatively high, there is still room for improvement in information knowledge and competence. This study provides adequate technical support and practical guidance for constructing a meta-universe ecosystem for international Chinese language education. It points out the necessity of improving students’ information literacy.

Organizational Cybersecurity Post The Pandemic: An Exploration of Remote Working Risks and Mitigation Strategies

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced organisations to embrace the largest remote workforce in history, yet this upheaval also brought an increasing number of cyber vulnerabilities to the fore. Organisations must remain committed to not leaving business processes, personal data, or vital infrastructure at risk, which has proved challenging for most. As remote working establishes itself as the new normal, criminals are seeking to capitalize on the widespread cybersecurity uncertainty, and succeeding. Private organisations and cybersecurity professionals must come together to establish robust solutions for home working cybersecurity. 
 This investigation explores several prevalent cyber risks (private networks, public hotspots, remote desktop protocol, authentication policies, virtual private network configuration and phishing attacks) across three key threat classifications of management, technical and human factors when remote working from the perspective of twenty industry experts. These findings offer key insights to emerging vulnerabilities, while also revealing defined strategies for organisations to help mitigate these challenges.

VNGuarder: An Internal Threat Detection Approach for Virtual Network in Cloud Computing Environment

Edge-assisted Internet of things applications often need to use cloud virtual network services to transmit data. However, the internal threats such as illegal management and configuration to cloud platform intentionally or unintentionally will lead to virtual network security problems such as malicious changes of user network and hijacked data flow. It will eventually affect edge-assisted Internet of things applications. We propose a virtual network internal threat detection method called VNGuarder in a cloud computing environment, which can effectively monitor whether the virtual network configuration of legitimate users under the IaaS cloud platform has been maliciously changed or destroyed by insiders. First, based on the life cycle of cloud virtual network services, we summarized two types of internal attacks involving illegal use of virtualization management tools and illegal invocation of virtual network-related processes. Second, based on normal behavior of tenants, a hierarchical trusted call correlation scheme is proposed to provide a basis for discovering that insiders illegally call virtualized management tools and virtual network-related processes on the controller node of the cloud platform or the network node and compute node. Third, a trace-enable mechanism combining real-time monitoring and log analysis is introduced. By collecting and recording the complete call process of virtual network management and configuration in the cloud platform, and comparing it with the result of the hierarchical trusted call correlation, abnormal operations can be reported to the tenants in time. Comprehensive simulation experiments on the Openstack platform show that VNGuarder can effectively detect illegal management and configuration of virtual networks by insiders without significantly affecting the creation time of tenant networks and the utilization of CPU and memory.

An Efficient Resource and Topological Attribute-Based Configuration Algorithm of Virtual Networks

In the future Internet operation and service model, users put forward network application requirements, and the service provider allocates the corresponding virtual network for users according to the demands. Virtual network resource allocation is an NP-hard problem; hence, the existing research work is mainly based on heuristic algorithms to solve the above problem. However, these traditional algorithms based solely on resource attributes are not sufficient to configure virtual networks. We design a virtual network configuration algorithm (ERTA-CA) based on the two-stage heuristic resource utilization that considers both local and global resource attributes and topological attributes of the network. The experimental results verify that our proposed algorithm can improve the acceptance rate and configuration revenue of the virtual network, which further indicates that ERTA-CA can achieve the virtual network configuration with efficient use of resources.

Virtual networks dependability assessment framework

Advances in virtualisation technology have enabled the development of network virtualisation that complements server virtualisation by enabling continuous workload agility irrespective of the network addressing and protocol of the underlying physical network. Despite huge benefits both in cost and accessibility, network virtualisation is susceptible to failure due to a wide variety of factors. Therefore, dependability in a virtualised network environment is a significant issue that need to be addressed before the full benefits of network virtualisation can be exploited. In this paper, we propose a framework to estimate dependability risks in virtual network environments considering variations in the virtual network configurations. The proposed framework uses the reliability block diagram (RBD) and continuous time Markov chains (CTMC) to model and analyse the dependability level of a virtual network. The proposed framework is helpful to the design and construction of more dependable VNE.

Software Defined Networking challenges and future direction: A case study of implementing SDN features on OpenStack private cloud

Cloud computing provides services on demand instantly, such as access to network infrastructure consisting of computing hardware, operating systems, network storage, database and applications. Network usage and demands are growing at a very fast rate and to meet the current requirements, there is a need for automatic infrastructure scaling. Traditional networks are difficult to automate because of the distributed nature of their decision making process for switching or routing which are collocated on the same device. Managing complex environments using traditional networks is time-consuming and expensive, especially in the case of generating virtual machines, migration and network configuration. To mitigate the challenges, network operations require efficient, flexible, agile and scalable software defined networks (SDN). This paper discuss various issues in SDN and suggests how to mitigate the network management related issues. A private cloud prototype test bed was setup to implement the SDN on the OpenStack platform to test and evaluate the various network performances provided by the various configurations.

Virtual Network Reconfiguration for Reducing Energy Consumption in Optical Data Centers

Energy consumption by data centers has become a serious problem, and measures for its reduction should be developed. Such measures should address not only the energy consumption of the servers but also that of the network itself, because the latter is responsible for a substantial portion of the total energy consumption. One approach to reducing the energy consumption of the network within a data center is to use optical circuit switches (OCSs) at the core of the data center, where electronic switches are connected to the OCSs. In such a network, a virtual network can be configured by setting the OCSs to connect different ports of the electronic packet switches. Thus, the energy consumption of the network can be reduced by configuring the virtual network to minimize the number of ports required by the electronic packet switches and powering down any unused ports. In this paper, we propose a method called virtual network reconfiguration for data center networks (VNR-DCN) that immediately reconfigures the virtual network so as to reduce the energy consumption under the constraints on the bandwidth and delay between servers in data center networks based on optical communication paths. In VNR-DCN, we configure the virtual network to satisfy the requirements by setting the parameters of the topology, called generalized flattened butterfly, instead of solving an optimization problem. In the evaluation, we show that a virtual network configured by VNR-DCN requires a small number of active ports. In addition, we show the impact of virtual network configuration on energy consumption.

A survey on automatic configuration of virtual private networks

Virtual private networks (VPN) offer a secure data exchange over public networks. Despite being cheaper than leased lines, growing sizes and dynamic behavior of VPN nodes, e.g., for mobility or reasons of denial-of-service-attacks, make a manual configuration of large, dynamic VPN expensive. Consequently, a number of different VPN auto-configuration approaches have been invented and partially deployed over the last decade. This article identifies a comprehensive set of objectives to be fulfilled by IP-based VPN auto-configuration, explains and groups mechanisms, and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses with regards to the objectives. Finally, it identifies potential future directions of autonomous VPN deployment.

Building an automated and self‐configurable emulation testbed for grid applications

AbstractDistributed systems, such as grids, are composed of geographically distributed computing elements that belong to multiple administrative domains and are controlled by multiple entities. It is unlikely that testers are able to acquire repeatedly the same resources, for the same amount of time, and under the same network conditions, which are paramount requirements for enabling reproducible and controlled tests in software under development. An alternative to experiments in real testbeds is the use of emulation tools, which allow the software to run in an environment that behaves like a distributed system. Although advances in virtualization technology allowed the development of efficient emulators, few efforts were put in making operation of such emulators easier. This paper presents the design and the development of the Automated Emulation Framework that allows automatic mapping of virtual machines to hosts, virtual machine deployment, network configuration, and proactive management and reconfiguration of the virtual infrastructure. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Configuration and coordination of virtual production networks

Following the actual discussion concerning modern production concepts, the term “virtual production” or “virtual enterprise” plays an increasingly important role. The idea of virtual enterprises is to implement modern management trends like “concentration on core competencies”, “distributed production” and “maximal customer orientation” by the application of advanced computer and telecommunication systems and services like “global networking” or “groupware systems”. The objective is to establish a certain kind of a “Best of everything Organization” by a synergetic combination of core competencies of single partners (centers of competence) in order to perform a given business project to a maximum degree of customer satisfaction. Important features are a distinct form of network organization in combination with a high degree of organizational flexibility. Taking into account Williamson's theory of transactions costs, virtual enterprises can be interpreted as a certain kind of an intermediate organizational form between the institutional poles: market and hierarchical structured enterprises. According to this an evaluation will be given on the basis of transaction costs. In the following section structural and process-orientated questions of virtual production systems are formulated. From the viewpoint of production science, especially the allocation of sub-tasks to adequate project partners and the harmonization of distributed production processes in a network of independent companies seems to be very interesting. Principally, the decision support systems for such problems can be based on hierarchical or distributed control strategies. The characteristics of virtual production systems imply the application of decentralized approaches (e.g. multi-agent systems). A very interesting approach in this context is the application of distributed problem-solving strategies like contract networks.

Broadband virtual private network signalling

In the corporate voice networks, the virtual private network (VPN) configuration is particularly useful where a shared network infrastructure can be more cost effective and flexible than dedicated leased lines. Current standards for VPN use the international narrowband private signalling system QSIG. Private network signalling standards for broadband networks are also developing rapidly and one can expect that the new emerging signalling systems such as ECMA's BQSIG and ATM Forum's PNNI will play a leading role in the broadband VPN in the future.

Algorithms for Optimized Node Arrangements in ShuffleNet Based Multihop Lightwave Networks

The capabilities of emerging optical technology, viz. dense wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and tunable optical transmitters and receivers (transceivers) can be exploited to construct lightwave networks, as follows. First, by employing WDM, the huge optical bandwidth (in the order of Terahertz) is partitioned into a number of smaller capacity channels (in the order of Gigahertz) which are compatible with the electronic interface speeds. Second, each node with its tunable transmitter(s) and receiver(s) can access a subset of the available channels by tuning its transceivers to the appropriate wavelengths. Now, the system can be configured as a broadcast-and-select network in which all of the inputs from various nodes are combined in a star coupler and the mixed optical information is broadcast to all the outputs. Thus, a multitude of virtual network configurations can be superimposed over any given physical network topology.The goal of this study is to exploit the aforementioned capabilities of lightwave technology in order to construct optimized regular multihop networks when the traffic flow among the network nodes is asymmetric. The specific problem addressed here is as follows: Given that the network nodes must be connected in a regular interconnection pattern and that the node positions in the regular network can be adjusted by properly tuning their (optical) transceivers, what is the best node placement in a given regular topology? We have chosen ShuffleNet based regular structure as the model of our network topology. ShuffleNet can interconnect a large number of nodes with a small number of transceivers per node such that information from a source can reach its destination in a small number of hops. However, finding the optimal node placement is a computationally hard problem. So, we formulate efficient heuristic algorithms to design optimized ShuffieNet structures for a given traffic matrix. Also, a scheme is developed to dynamically rearrange the logical node positions to a new optimized configuration, within the ShuffleNet framework, when the pattern of offered load changes.