Internship Programmes
 
Security Mechanisms in Delay-Tolerant Networking

Discipline: Computer Engineering / Computer Science / Electrical Engineering preferred

Project Description:
Background.  Transmission of information in the future is envisaged to take place over “challenged networks”, and not just limited to within the Gigabit Internet which would connect most homes. In such challenged networks, it can be observed that bandwidth is constrained, resources are limited, and end-to-end connectivity is intermittent. Certain TCP/IP applications would fail. Delay-Tolerant Networking is an emerging technology being developed by the Internet Research Task Force Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group to handle such high-delay environments. A few associated network protocol proposals have been implemented and are being fine-tuned by the community.

Objectives.  The objectives are to carry out experimental studies on a network tested which possesses Delay-Tolerant Networking capability, and to characterize some security-performance trade-offs using some specified homogeneous lower-layer connectivity technology. Some amount of programming would be required to write proof-of-concept modules to handle a few operational and security issues of interest.

It is envisaged that the candidate intern would take away from this internship useful hands-on experience in TCP/IP networking, traffic engineering and analysis, as well as some information security knowledge.

Deserving candidates who successfully demonstrate the concepts/prototype would be funded to attend a relevant overseas/local conference.

Pre-requisite:
Non-technical
- Self-motivated.
- Interested to think up and apply creative approaches to solve problems.

Technical
- Proficient in Linux programming and C.
- Some acquaintance with security concepts such as confidentiality, authentication and availability.