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Research Topics

Students and researchers often ask the RIPE NCC whether we have a list of topics relevant to the RIPE community. We reached out to the RIPE community, as well as our staff, and asked for suggestions.

Cybersecurity Due Diligence

This research topic covers an interdisciplinary study of international law and computer science on the question of an international cybersecurity due diligence standard. International law has long recognised the principle of due diligence in the law of state responsibility and international reliability. The due diligence standard is increasingly present in international documents on cybersecurity, for example the recommendations of the Council of Europe or the influential reports of the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts on Developments in the Field of Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security. Be it maritime oil transportation or nuclear energy supply, states have long sought the advice of technical experts in setting national laws and international standards when it comes to preventing significant transboundary harm. The proposed research attempts to draw on these experiences for the purposes of ensuring effective, international cybersecurity measures. This work will have great practical significance in light of the upcoming implementation of the EU NIS Directive, recognising critical Internet resources as parts of European infrastructures.

Do you have questions? Contact Joanna Kulesza, University of Lodz, Poland.

Critical Internet Infrastructure and Shared Resources in International Law

This research topic refers to the well-known notion of Common Heritage of Mankind (CHMK) and the idea of critical Internet resources being recognized as "res comunis omnium" – a shared resource, protected through international law guarantees, to be used to the benefit of all mankind. Thus far international law has looked at the outer space and the deep seabed as those areas where international protection was needed. They are to be explored by all on equal footing and used for peaceful purposes only. The debate on including e.g. the Internet backbone or the DNS as elements of the CHMK has been present in academic discussion for over a decade. Most recently the Dutch presidency of the EU pushed for identifying "Internet's core of key protocols and infrastructure" to be "considered a global public good that provides benefits to everyone".

While this idea of Critical Internet Resources as a part of the CHMK is slowly slipping into the international political debate on Internet governance, there has been little technical expertise provided. This proposed project aims at supplementing the existing CHMK dogmatic framework with technical expertise to answer the question of whether it is possible and feasible to identify such core Internet resources that should be granted international protection. In particular, the questions of private ownership, security and international law enforcement will be addressed.

Do you have questions? Contact Joanna Kulesza, University of Lodz, Poland.

Governmental Involvement in Internet Standard Setting

On the Internet, code is law. While laws are made by parliaments, judges and at times governments, those actors play little to no role in Internet standard setting. Or do they? This proposed study looks to identify the actual involvement of state actors (state agencies, ministries, state sponsored lobbyists) in such forums as RIPE, IETF, W3C and alike. With that it seeks to answer the question on the role states play in Internet standards setting. The proposed aim of the study is to provide both: transparency on the issue addressed and recommendations to policy makers on their presence in such Internet "law"-making bodies.

Do you have questions? Contact Joanna Kulesza, University of Lodz, Poland.

RIPE Atlas Distribution Measurement Tool

The RIPE NCC would like to build a tool to help us get a better overview of the distribution of Internet measurement points (RIPE Atlas). Currently, there are over 9000 RIPE Atlas probes distributed around the world, but the distribution is quite biased towards certain countries and networks. So, for future distribution of batches of these devices by the RIPE NCC, we'd like to get the devices into places that are currently not well represented. This tool should identify where these places are, based on the current status of the deployment of our measurement vantage points combined with external data from authoritative Internet data sources.

If you are interested in helping us build this tool, please contact Vesna Manojlovic and Emile Aben.

Traffic Measurement and Data Analysis

It is essential to understand recent trends in customer traffic. Possible research topics include:

  • Development of traffic visualization tools (e.g., for multi-dimensional traffic time-series or for video streaming quality)
  • Development of algorithms to provide compact summary information of large-scale traffic data
  • Development of tools to collect and analyze behaviors of HTTP video streaming clients (e.g., MPEG-DASH implementations)
  • Analysis of video streaming traffic behaviors (e.g., differences in video segment fetching strategies)
  • Modeling and simulation of network traffic
  • Development of monitoring tools for large-scale measurement platforms (e.g. detect outages or identify physical topology from traceroute datasets)
  • Analysis of syslog messages for finding possible threats or misbehaviors

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Internet Routing

Research topics in this area include:

  • The mining of big data, such as the detection and correlation of control and data plane events
  • The development of tools to identify protocol deployment or routing implementation issues
  • The study, measurement, and development of routing protocol security architecture, designs, and mechanisms
  • The study and evaluation of routing protocol extensions
  • Building a testbed to see that a router correctly performs RPKI-Based Origin Validation
  • Work on medium scale, O(1000) routers, simulation of BGPsec deployment secure measurement of network performance

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Internet Security

Research topics in this area include:

  • OpSec: attack mitigation, device protection, operational practices, configuration automation, VPNs and firewalls, etc.
  • Routing: protocol design (RPKI, origin validation, BGPsec), deployment research and measurement, modeling, etc.
  • Systems: configuration, automation, log analysis, measurement and auditing

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Network System Automatic Control

Work can be done to develop network system management technologies to implement Service Defined Infrastructure (SvDI). The following topics can be considered:

  • Automatic management controller for network resource
  • Network resource database
  • Automatic location algorithm for defined service
  • The Interface between Service definition and resource controller

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Cloud Infrastructure

Possible topics in this area include:

  • Datacenter automation software framework
  • Large scale information gathering and processing system for datacenter control
  • Datacenter friendly cloud orchestration technologies
  • Datacenter friendly virtualization technologies (VMM/Container/Orchestrater)
  • HCI area research, such as an user interface for datacenter operators to support understanding large amount of information
  • Other related research topics (research proposals are welcome)

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area and will make available a small data center (about 100 servers) for the purposes of research. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Virtual Machine Operation Management

The objective is to design and develop scalable virtual machine operation management tools and system based on RFC7666 for KVM.

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.

Library Operating System

With the name of specialization, various academic and open source projects invented different shape of network stacks and operating systems. While the specializations avoiding generalization tax solve specific problems of network stack, those are often coupled with the downgraded features due to the specializations, which are hard to recover because the feature richness usually comes with the incremental growth of operating systems.

As a result, there are still serious problems of conventional network stack and library operating systems (or userspace network stacks):

  • Network stack ossification (hard to introduce new features), lack of personality
  • Lack of generality, resulting no legacy application support
  • Simply a waste of time (if it is implemented from scratch)

The primary goal of this project is 1) to alleviate the current issue of network stacks, and 2) to retain the feature-richness of the current operating systems by morphing a monolithic kernel into an any kernel implementation (a.k.a. library operating system). The concept of library operating system is not new but it is emerging to address current issues on operating system and network stack.

The objective of this project is to design and develop an implementation of library operating system, Linux Kernel Library (or LKL), to solve aforementioned issues of current operating system. Possible topics are:

  • Supporting general applications with feature-rich network stack
  • Benchmark studies with the implemented software to understand the bottlenecks (incl. comparison with alternatives)
  • Develop LKL as a base of Unikernel with the particular application runtime

IIJ is offering internships for university students in this area. For more information, look at their website or send them an email.