The University of Colorado, Boulder is a leading public university located in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. The Computer Systems faculty across the ECE and CS departments research a number of areas, including security, networking, operating systems, and computer architecture.
Department: Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering. (also Computer Science)
E-mail: eric.keller@colorado.edu
We are a public sector organization and we plan to involve industry partners
- Looking for: Innovators/Entrepreneurs,Researcher (scientific/technical/engineering)
- Track: Challenges,Open Ideas
Preferred hosting duration: No preference
Maximum number of fellows to be hosted by the organization simultaneously : 3
2 Challenges:
PROJECT 1 (GHOST):
In many areas of the world, 5G networks are deployed and operated by organizations that are untrusted and potentially hostile. In this challenge, we are looking for new security technologies that enable secure operations over untrusted networks. An example approach for this challenge, could include 1) identity virtualization (e.g., enabling dynamic swapping of identifiers on the network, such as SIM), 2) traffic obfuscation of an individual (e.g., by generating fake network activity that masks their real activity), 3) group activity obfuscation (e.g., establishing connections and generating fake traffic to hide the activity of a group). Example skills (not all are needed): Network traffic analysis, software development (to generate traffic, e.g., with python), 5G security architecture, Android kernel development.
PROJECT 2 (TNA):
Applications that we use every day each need to have traffic processed to secure and optimize the application, but current network infrastructure is showing signs that it won’t be able to keep up with the growing growing needs. In this project, we are looking to transparently accelerate network processing in Linux. One possible approach is to decompose Linux network functionality into fast-path and slow-path functions with explicitly optimized execution environments for each. With that, we can automatically and dynamically instantiates only the part of the network stack that is used, and target two fast-path execution environments from a single source code description of modules: (i) the eXpress Data Path (XDP), for in-kernel processing, and (ii) a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based SmartNIC, for hardware accelerated processing. Example skills (not all are needed): Linux Networking, eBPF, XDP, C/C++, FPGA development.