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--- ongoing [2010/05/03 19:35] – bil
+++ ongoing [2011/10/14 12:57] (current) – bil
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ====== Ongoing projects ======
+====== Web Crawlers Behaving Like Humans: Are We There Yet!?  ======
-====== Low-Cost Three-Dimensional Face Scanning System ======
+**Student**:  Dmitry Drinfeld
-**Supervisor**:  James Elder
+**Supervisor**: Natalija Vlajic
-**Requirements**:  Interest in both hardware and software design at the systems level.
+**Required Background**: CSE4480 prerequisites
 __Description__
-Low-cost three-dimensional face-scanning systems have a large range of potential applications in security and retail markets.  Our laboratory at York University has recently developed a prototype face-scanning system that has the potential for very low-cost mass production.  This project involves the development of a second-stage prototype that is one-step closer to commercialization.
+Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are recognized as one
+of the most serious threats to today's Internet due to the relative
-The project will involve systems design and development of a specialized real-time 3D face scanner.  A combination of hardware and software design will be required.  The student will work closely with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at York University, as well as researchers at other institutions involved in the project.  The student will develop skills in both hardware and software design, as well as computer-vision techniques.
+simplicity of their execution and their ability to severely degrade
+the quality at which Web-based services are offered to the end users.
-For more information on the laboratory: [[http://www.elderlab.yorku.ca]]
+An especially challenging form of DDoS attacks are the so-called
+Application-Layer DDoS attacks. Namely:
-====== Programming Multi-Core GPUs with CUDA ======
-**Supervisor**: Franck van Breugel
-**Required background**: General prerequisites
-**Recommended background**: N/A
-__Description__
-CUDA stands for "compute unified device architecture."  It is an architecture to program multicore graphical processing units (GPUs for short).  In the past, these GPUs were only used for graphics. However, CUDA allows us to use these GPUs for other types of computation. Since today's GPUs have hundreds of cores, algorithms can be parallelized and, hence, run often much faster.
-The aim of this project is to get familiar with GPUs and to study how to program them.
-More details can be found at: [[http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~franck/projects/cuda.html]]
-(this link is only accessible from machines within the domain yorku.ca.)
+  - In Application-Layer DDoS attacks, the attackers utilize a flood of legitimate-looking Layer-7 network sessions (i.e., sessions that are generally hard to detect and/or filter out by a firewall or an IDS system)
+  - Increasingly, these sessions comprise HTML requests generated by a cleverly programmed crawler that executes a semi-random walk over the web site links, thereby attempting to appear as a legitimate human visitor.
+The goal of this project is to investigate the state of the art in
+malicious web crawler design. In particular, the project will look
+into the challenges of designing a smart-DDoS-crawler from the
+attacker point of view - one of these challenges being the estimation
+of web-page popularity assuming no a priori access to the web-logs
+of the victim web-site.