Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

Inria Associate Teams Not Involved in an Inria International Labs

NetMSS

• Title: NETwork Monitoring and Service orchestration for Softwarized networks

• International Partner (Institution - Laboratory - Researcher):

  • University of Waterloo (Canada), David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science - Raouf Boutaba

• Start year: 2018

• Duration: 3 years

• See also: https://team.inria.fr/netmss/

• Evolution towards softwarized networks are greatly changing the landscape in networking. In the last years, effort was focused on how to integrate network elements in cloud-based models. This lead to the advent of network function virtualization primarily relying on regular virtualization technologies and on some advances in network programmability. Several architectural models have been proposed and, even if no full consensus has been reached yet, they highlight the major components. Among them, monitoring and orchestration are vital elements in order to ensure a proper assessment of the network conditions (network monitoring) serving as the support for the decision when deploying services (orchestration). With softwarization of networks, these elements can benefit from a higher flexibility but the latter requires new methods to be efficiently handled. For example, monitoring softwarized networks necessitates the collection of heterogeneous information, regarding the network but also cloud resources, from many locations. Targeting such a holistic monitoring will then support better decision algorithms, to be applied in a scalable and efficient manner, taking advantage of the advanced capabilities in terms of network configuration and programmability. In addition, real-time constraints in networking are very strong due to the transient nature of network traffic and are faced with high throughputs, especially in data-center networks where softwarization primarily takes place. Therefore, the associate team will promote (1) line-rate and accurate monitoring and (2) efficient resource uses for service orchestration leveraging micro-services.

Inria International Partners

Declared Inria International Partners

The team is actively involved in the international program of LUE (Lorraine Université d'Excellence):

Prof. Raouf Boutaba (University of Waterloo): Inria International Chair and Professor@Lorraine

Abir Laraba: international PhD grant in cooperation with University of Waterloo

Mehdi Zakroum: international PhD grant in cooperation with International University of Rabat

Informal International Partners

Since 2019, we have started a collaboration with Sonia Mettali from the CRISTAL Lab at the ENSI engineering school (Tunisia) on the development of reinforcement learning methods for the monitoring of IoT. The work is done in the context of the PhD of Mohamed Said Frikha, jointly co-supervised by Sonia Mettali and Abdelkader Lahmadi.

Participation in Other International Programs

ThreatPredict

• Title: ThreatPredict, From Global Social and Technical Big Data to Cyber Threat Forecast

• Coordinator: Inria

• Duration: December 2017 - November 2020

• Others Partners: International University of Rabat (IUR), Carnegie Mellon University

• Funding: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

• Abstract: Predicting attacks can help to prevent them or at least reduce their impact. Nowadays, existing attack prediction methods make accurate predictions only hours in advance or cannot predict geo-politically motivated attacks. ThreatPredict aims to predict different attack types days in advance. It develops machine-learning algorithms that capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of cyber-attacks and global social, geo-political and technical events. Various sources of information are collected, enriched and correlated such as honeypot data, darknet, GDELT, Twitter, and vulnerability databases. In addition to warning about attacks, this project will improve our understanding of the effect of global events on cyber-security.