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At least 91 records · Page 5

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in a Control Center Environment

The technology of transmitting voice over data networks has been available for over 10 years. Mass market VoIP services for consumers to make and receive standard telephone calls over broadband Internet networks have grown in the last 5 years. While operational costs are less with VoIP implementations as opposed to time division multiplexing (TDM) based voice switches, is it still advantageous to convert a mission control center s voice system to this newer technology? Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) has converted its mission voice services to a commercial product that utilizes VoIP technology. Results from this testing, design, and installation have shown unique considerations that must be addressed before user operations. There are many factors to consider for a control center voice design. Technology advantages and disadvantages were investigated as they refer to cost. There were integration concerns which could lead to complex failure scenarios but simpler integration for the mission infrastructure. MSFC HOSC will benefit from this voice conversion with less product replacement cost, less operations cost and a more integrated mission services environment.

Calvelage, Steven↗

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in a Control Center Environment

The technology of transmitting voice over data networks has been available for over 10 years. Mass market VoIP services for consumers to make and receive standard telephone calls over broadband Internet networks have grown in the last 5 years. While operational costs are less with VoIP implementations as opposed to time division multiplexing (TDM) based voice switches, is it still advantageous to convert a mission control center s voice system to this newer technology? Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) has converted its mission voice services to a commercial product that utilizes VoIP technology. Results from this testing, design, and installation have shown unique considerations that must be addressed before user operations. There are many factors to consider for a control center voice design. Technology advantages and disadvantages were investigated as they refer to cost. There were integration concerns which could lead to complex failure scenarios but simpler integration for the mission infrastructure. MSFC HOSC will benefit from this voice conversion with less product replacement cost, less operations cost and a more integrated mission services environment.

Pirani, Joseph↗

Use of IPsec by Manned Space Missions

NASA's Constellation Program is developing its next generation manned space systems for missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and the Moon. The Program is embarking on a path towards standards based Internet Protocol (IP) networking for space systems communication. The IP based communications will be paired with industry standard security mechanisms such as Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) to ensure the integrity of information exchanges and prevent unauthorized release of sensitive information in-transit. IPsec has been tested in simulations on the ground and on at least one Earth orbiting satellite, but the technology is still unproven in manned space mission situations and significant obstacles remain.

Pajevski, Michael J.↗

Nanosensors-Cellphone Integration for Extended Chemical Sensing Network

This poster is to present the development of a cellphone sensor network for extended chemical sensing. The nanosensors using carbon nanotubes and other nanostructures are used with low power and high sensitivity for chemical detection. The sensing module has been miniaturized to a small size that can plug in or clip on to a smartphone. The chemical information detected by the nanosensors are acquired by a smartphone and transmitted via cellphone 3g or WiFi network to an internet server. The whole integrated sensing system from sensor to cellphone to a cloud will provide an extended chemical sensing network that can cover nation wide and even cover global wide for early warning of a hazardous event.

Li, Jing↗

Foundations of Rigorous Cyber Experimentation

This report presents the results of the “Foundations of Rigorous Cyber Experimentation” (FORCE) Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project. This project is a companion project to the “Science and Engineering of Cyber security through Uncertainty quantification and Rigorous Experimentation” (SECURE) Grand Challenge LDRD project. This project leverages the offline, controlled nature of cyber experimentation technologies in general, and emulation testbeds in particular, to assess how uncertainties in network conditions affect uncertainties in key metrics. We conduct extensive experimentation using a Firewheel emulation-based cyber testbed model of Invisible Internet Project (I2P) networks to understand a de-anonymization attack formerly presented in the literature. Our goals in this analysis are to see if we can leverage emulation testbeds to produce reliably repeatable experimental networks at scale, identify significant parameters influencing experimental results, replicate the previous results, quantify uncertainty associated with the predictions, and apply multi-fidelity techniques to forecast results to real-world network scales. The I2P networks we study are up to three orders of magnitude larger than the networks studied in SECURE and presented additional challenges to identify significant parameters. The key contributions of this project are the application of SECURE techniques such as UQ to a scenario of interest and scaling the SECURE techniques to larger network sizes. This report describes the experimental methods and results of these studies in more detail. In addition, the process of constructing these large-scale experiments tested the limits of the Firewheel emulation-based technologies. Therefore, another contribution of this work is that it informed the Firewheel developers of scaling limitations, which were subsequently corrected.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

User Access to Scientific Facilities via 5G: A Cyber Security Thought Experiment

5G is more than an over-the-air radio technology upgrade. It is a strategy to extend Mobile Network Operator service offerings beyond traditional voice, instant messaging and Internet access. 5G Mobile Network Operators will offer new telecommunication services that include enhanced guarantees of confidentiality, integrity and availability. How could such services change the way Science collaborations connect scientists to supercomputers and other scientific facilities? Current scientific collaborations implicitly trust cloud service providers to securely store and process data. The perceived risks of outsourcing Science data security are counterbalanced by assurances that cloud providers operate at a scale that allows them to implement security measures impractical for Science collaborations (e.g. continuous system administrator behavioral monitoring and strict individual separation of duties). If that is true for a cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (2018 revenue: $25.7 billion), could it also be true for Mobile Network Operators like Verizon Wireless (2018 revenue: $91.7 billion) or AT&T Mobility (2018 revenue: $71.3 billion)? DOE Leadership Class supercomputer facility users currently access them from the public Internet via Secure Shell. The sponsors and operators of the supercomputer facilities have determined that the public Internet path between the Scientist’s Device and the Login Node does not natively provide enough confidentiality or integrity to protect those communications. Therefore, the facilities achieve additional confidentiality and integrity by requiring Secure Shell encryption across those untrusted network paths. Using 5G Network Slice technology, a Mobile Network Operator may offer communication services between supercomputer users and facilities that natively provide confidentiality and integrity guarantees. Sponsors and operators of supercomputer facilities may determine that these guarantees provide enough confidentiality and integrity to protect those communications. If so, a 5G Network Slice could replace an SSH session running over the public Internet. Finally, this use case could be extended to other Office of Science user facility access requirements. Consider microscopy instruments at (e.g.) the Center for Nanoscale Materials or the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. The embedded systems controlling such instruments may not always support encrypted network access technologies like SSH. 5G Network Slices may offer an alternative to current VPN or SSH tunneling techniques, with additional benefits like guaranteed minimum bandwidth.

5G↗

Deep Space Networking Experiments on the EPOXI Spacecraft

NASA's Space Communications & Navigation Program within the Space Operations Directorate is operating a program to develop and deploy Disruption Tolerant Networking [DTN] technology for a wide variety of mission types by the end of 2011. DTN is an enabling element of the Interplanetary Internet where terrestrial networking protocols are generally unsuitable because they rely on timely and continuous end-to-end delivery of data and acknowledgments. In fall of 2008 and 2009 and 2011 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory installed and tested essential elements of DTN technology on the Deep Impact spacecraft. These experiments, called Deep Impact Network Experiment (DINET 1) were performed in close cooperation with the EPOXI project which has responsibility for the spacecraft. The DINET 1 software was installed on the backup software partition on the backup flight computer for DINET 1. For DINET 1, the spacecraft was at a distance of about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) from Earth. During DINET 1 300 images were transmitted from the JPL nodes to the spacecraft. Then, they were automatically forwarded from the spacecraft back to the JPL nodes, exercising DTN's bundle origination, transmission, acquisition, dynamic route computation, congestion control, prioritization, custody transfer, and automatic retransmission procedures, both on the spacecraft and on the ground, over a period of 27 days. The first DINET 1 experiment successfully validated many of the essential elements of the DTN protocols. DINET 2 demonstrated: 1) additional DTN functionality, 2) automated certain tasks which were manually implemented in DINET 1 and 3) installed the ION SW on nodes outside of JPL. DINET 3 plans to: 1) upgrade the LTP convergence-layer adapter to conform to the international LTP CL specification, 2) add convergence-layer "stewardship" procedures and 3) add the BSP security elements [PIB & PCB]. This paper describes the planning and execution of the flight experiment and the validation results.

automated data communication↗

User-Friendly Interface Developed for a Web-Based Service for SpaceCAL Emulations

A team at the NASA Glenn Research Center is developing a Space Communications Architecture Laboratory (SpaceCAL) for protocol development activities for coordinated satellite missions. SpaceCAL will provide a multiuser, distributed system to emulate space-based Internet architectures, backbone networks, formation clusters, and constellations. As part of a new effort in 2003, building blocks are being defined for an open distributed system to make the satellite emulation test bed accessible through an Internet connection. The first step in creating a Web-based service to control the emulation remotely is providing a user-friendly interface for encoding the data into a well-formed and complete Extensible Markup Language (XML) document. XML provides coding that allows data to be transferred between dissimilar systems. Scenario specifications include control parameters, network routes, interface bandwidths, delay, and bit error rate. Specifications for all satellite, instruments, and ground stations in a given scenario are also included in the XML document. For the SpaceCAL emulation, the XML document can be created using XForms, a Webbased forms language for data collection. Contrary to older forms technology, the interactive user interface makes the science prevalent, not the data representation. Required versus optional input fields, default values, automatic calculations, data validation, and reuse will help researchers quickly and accurately define missions. XForms can apply any XML schema defined for the test mission to validate data before forwarding it to the emulation facility. New instrument definitions, facilities, and mission types can be added to the existing schema. The first prototype user interface incorporates components for interactive input and form processing. Internet address, data rate, and the location of the facility are implemented with basic form controls with default values provided for convenience and efficiency using basic XForms operations. Because different emulation scenarios will vary widely in their component structure, more complex operations are used to add and delete facilities.

Liszka, Kathy J.↗

Experiences with the AEROnet/PSCN ATM Prototype

This paper discusses the experience gained by the AEROnet/PSCN networking team in deploying a prototype Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) based network as part of the wide-area network for the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation (NAS) Program at NASA Ames Research Center. The objectives of this prototype were to test concepts in using ATM over wide-area Internet Protocol (IP) networks and measure end-to-end system performance. This testbed showed that end-to-end ATM over a DS3 reaches approximately 80% of the throughput achieved from a FDDI to DS3 network. The 20% reduction in through-put can be attributed to the overhead associated with running ATM. As a result, we conclude that if the loss in capacity due to ATM overhead is balanced by the reduction in cost of ATM services, as compared to dedicated circuits, then ATM can be a viable alternative.

Kurak, Richard S.↗

Evolution and Trends of Industrial Control System Cyber Incidents since 2017

The industrial control systems (ICSs) that manage our critical infrastructure are increasingly converging with corporate networks and the Internet as technology and businesses prioritize digital connectivity. These connections make them more vulnerable and available to malicious cyber actors who traditionally targeted the companies’ more public-facing information technology (IT) networks. This paper will review select publicly reported cyber incidents to highlight the continued and growing threat to ICS devices and operational technology (OT) environments. It will summarize the incident and when available, will provide information on the cyber actors, the vulnerabilities they exploited, and any publications the U.S. Government (USG) provided in response. Data belonging to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will be used to highlight quantitative trends concerning ICS incidents. This paper builds on “History of Industrial Control System Cyber Incidents” (Hemsley & Fisher 2018), a paper that highlighted select noteworthy threats and incidents to ICS systems up to 2017. This paper will similarly review select incidents occurring after the last previously reviewed incident, Triton/HatMan, December 2017, and will note ICS incident trends including IT/OT convergence and advances in cyber-threat actors’ capabilities in observed in the examined incidents.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

From Long-distance Entanglement to Building a Nationwide Quantum Internet: Report of the DOE Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop

A Quantum Path Forward. Today, many scientific experts recognize that building and scaling quantum-protected and enhanced communication networks are among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century. The international research community perceives the construction of a first prototype global quantum network-the Quantum Internet-to be within reach over the next decade. In February 2020, the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)'s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research hosted the Quantum Internet Blueprint workshop to define a potential roadmap toward building the first nationwide quantum Internet. The workshop participants included representatives from DOE national laboratories, universities, industry, and other U.S. agencies with serious interests in quantum networking. The goal was to provide an outline of the essential research needed, detail any engineering and design barriers, and suggest a path forward to move from today's limited local network experiments to a viable, secure quantum Internet.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

From Long-distance Entanglement to Building a Nationwide Quantum Internet: Report of the DOE Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop

A Quantum Path Forward. Today, many scientific experts recognize that building and scaling quantum-protected and enhanced communication networks are among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century. The international research community perceives the construction of a first prototype global quantum network-the Quantum Internet-to be within reach over the next decade. In February 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research hosted the Quantum Internet Blueprint workshop to define a potential roadmap toward building the first nationwide quantum Internet. The workshop participants included representatives from DOE national laboratories, universities, industry, and other U.S. agencies with serious interests in quantum networking. The goal was to provide an outline of the essential research needed, detail any engineering and design barriers, and suggest a path forward to move from today's limited local network experiments to a viable, secure quantum Internet.

Peters, Nicholas↗

Enhanced Communication Network Solution for Positive Train Control Implementation

The commuter and freight railroad industry is required to implement Positive Train Control (PTC) by 2015 (2012 for Metrolink), a challenging network communications problem. This paper will discuss present technologies developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to overcome comparable communication challenges encountered in deep space mission operations. PTC will be based on a new cellular wireless packet Internet Protocol (IP) network. However, ensuring reliability in such a network is difficult due to the "dead zones" and transient disruptions we commonly experience when we lose calls in commercial cellular networks. These disruptions make it difficult to meet PTC s stringent reliability (99.999%) and safety requirements, deployment deadlines, and budget. This paper proposes innovative solutions based on space-proven technologies that would help meet these challenges: (1) Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) technology, designed for use in resource-constrained, embedded systems and currently in use on the International Space Station, enables reliable communication over networks in which timely data acknowledgments might not be possible due to transient link outages. (2) Policy-Based Management (PBM) provides dynamic management capabilities, allowing vital data to be exchanged selectively (with priority) by utilizing alternative communication resources. The resulting network may help railroads implement PTC faster, cheaper, and more reliably.

Policy-Based Management (PBM)↗

Estimating Total Electron Content Using 1,000+ GPS Receivers

A computer program uses data from more than 1,000 Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers in an Internet-accessible global network to generate daily estimates of the global distribution of vertical total electron content (VTEC) of the ionosphere. This program supersedes an older program capable of processing readings from only about 200 GPS receivers. This program downloads the data via the Internet, then processes the data in three stages. In the first stage, raw data from a global subnetwork of about 200 receivers are preprocessed, station by station, in a Kalman-filter-based least-squares estimation scheme that estimates satellite and receiver differential biases for these receivers and for satellites. In the second stage, an observation equation that incorporates the results from the first stage and the raw data from the remaining 800 receivers is solved to obtain the differential biases for these receivers. The only remaining error sources for which an account cannot be given are multipath and receiver noise contributions. The third stage is a postprocessing stage in which all the processed data are combined and used to generate new data products, including receiver differential biases and global and regional VTEC maps and animations.

Komjathy, Attila↗

Cooperative Clustering Techniques For Space Network Scalability

Routing in the space internet must face many unique challenges - from unplanned disconnections and interruptions to predictable intermittent connectivity due to high network mobility and long propagation delays. NASA’s current approach to such routing is Contact Graph Routing (CGR), using a graph formed of prescheduled communication contacts to compute routes through the network. While this approach manages to tackle issues of connectivity and propagation delays, it is a global approach that requires continuous knowledge of the entire network. In a potential future Solar Space Internet (SSI) such an approach on its own cannot scale to large networks with thousands of members. In this paper we propose clustering as a solution to CGR scalability. Clustering has been used in many networking problems as a way to subdivide the network and allow for localized routing and better scalability. Using techniques from graph theory and game theory, we explore various existing clustering algorithms and adapt them to the Contact Graph Routing setting. We propose a way to combine multiple algorithms to create a Delay Tolerant Clustering Protocol (DTCP). In addition, we explore the underlying networking mechanisms such as multicast, neighbor discovery, and software defined networking that may be used to enable DTCP.

Delay Tolerant Networking↗

Supporting Cyber Security of Power Distribution Systems by Detecting Differences Between Real-time Micro-Synchrophasor Measurements and Cyber-Reported SCADA (Final Report)

As modern power grids tend towards greater levels of automation and communication, the challenges of identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities to cyber-attacks are ones that are increasingly demanding attention. Today’s power system has evolved to form the foundational bedrock of modern society, and an attack on this infrastructure could prove disastrous. In this project we were tasked to investigate the use of distribution synchrophasors as an independent isolated sensor network with which we can corroborate, or flag potentially spoofed,Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) data. We adapted an approach to marry the underlying physical properties of power systems with the network communications used by power systems in order to offer insights unattainable by either data stream isolation. While the concept of intrusion detection systems (IDS) is well understood for monitoring network traffic and traditional IT computing systems, the approach discussed in this report is motivated by several key notions: first, current SCADA communications alone presents an incomplete view of the grid. Second, the power grid, and the equipment controlling it, is grounded by laws of physics. Given this, we leverage high-frequency physical grid measurements to understand the physical condition of the grid, and combine this with SCADA. While high-frequency physical grid measurements and SCADA communication over Internet Protocol (IP) networks are fundamentally disparate information sources, when collectively examined through appropriate lenses, they offer a much more nuanced depiction of the grid.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Dynamic Shared Computing Resources for Multi-Robot Mars Exploration

The NASA roadmap for 2020 and beyond includes several key technologies which will have a game-changing impact on planetary exploration. The first of these is High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC), which will provide orders of magnitude increases in processing power for next-generation rovers and orbiters (Doyle et al. 2013). The second is Delay Tolerant Networking, which overlays the Deep Space Network, providing internet-like abstractions and store-forward to route data through intermittent delays in connectivity. The third is a trend toward small, co-dependent robots included in flagship missions (MarCO, PUFFER, and Mars Heli). Taken together, these imply an increasing amount of communication and computing heterogeneity on Mars in coming decades. Motivated by these technological trends, we study the concept of Mars on-site shared analysis, information, and communication (MOSAIC) for Mars exploration. The key algorithmic problem associated with MOSAIC networks is simultaneous scheduling of computation, communication, and caching of data, which we illustrate using the three scenarios. We present models, preliminary solutions, and simulation results for two scenarios, showing how mission efficiency relates to communication bandwidth, processing power, geography of the environment, and optimal scheduling of computation, communication, and data caching. The third scenario illustrates future directions of this work.

Chien, Steve↗