This weeks been a big week for me, not to do with the project though. I turned 21 and got my first hole in one out at Ngahinapouri Golf Course. But back to the project, its been another slow week however the tools seem to be working now. I've managed to figure out how the clock management (MMCM) works on the boards. The real setback at the moment is we're not sure how to use the on board NIC within the programmable logic. I have posted on a forum and hopefully get a reply soon.

This week was spent looking at how new amp2 is going to work and Brendon and I started writing a Python library to query data out of AMP. Also have been helping out with a few student projects and making sure everyone is happy.

We cleaned out G.1.01 which is going to be temporarily occupied by Wei Minn while F-G link construction is going on.

The week before I left for IMC:
* Finished my draft of the libprotoident paper for TMA. Because of the broken Auckland box, I wasn't able to re-run my analysis using the more up-to-date classification software. Instead, I've just submitted a draft based on the old results, with an eye to possibly updating them should we get accepted.
* Released a new version of libprotoident including all the new protocol rules that I'd added over the past couple of weeks.
* Started working on a little project to measure exactly how hopeless L7 Filter is for traffic classification. So many papers and tools use L7 Filter as either the basis for their rules or as ground truth for validation, which I think is a very bad idea. Hoping to get a paper out of it all. The initial phase of my evaluation involves capturing traffic from a number of common Internet applications and testing whether L7 Filter can correctly identify them. So far, it has managed to get 1/3 right :)

Spent the week before last in Boston for IMC. Managed to successfully present my paper on the Copyright Amendment Act and got a fairly good reception. Also got a chance to meet a few folks and put some faces to names. Some of the presentations were interesting, but there was also a lot of stuff that I found to be less useful (social networks lol).

This week I managed to compile and install a Linux kernel and root file system unto one of the SD cards for the Zedboard. I Was then able to boot this kernel on the Zedboard and run a full Linux installation. The next step will be to collaborate with Mark to create some test logic such a register in the FPGA and expose it to the processing system and user programs running on the Linux install.

More work on libtrace and PACKET_MMAP this week.

Got writing back to the interface working using the packet_mmap method. Significant speed improvement about 3x that of the current method.

Change the buffer allocation for PACKET_MMAP to allow the maximum achievable buffer size (kernel dependent) and more efficient memory use.

Added to existing code to use tpacket2_hdr as opposed to tpacket_hdr if available. Version 2 adds time stamping to the nanosecond, as opposed to v1 which was only to the nearest microsecond. This also fixes a major mistake made in the v1 header, it wasn't a fixed size on 32&64-bit machines which causes compatibility issues.

Had a play with the Ixia traffic generator. Ran some comparisons between PACKET_MMAP and the current capture method. As well as packet drop rate depending on PACKET_MMAP buffer sizes.

Spent the week familiarizing myself with the way pyramid displays web content, relating this back to the ampweb skeleton code, and started making minor changes. Also did some tutorials on retrieving/handling data, using SQLalchemy. I've started reading a few books on designing usable, intuitive interfaces, including "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug (good read).

Managed to get .class.c files to compile into .class.o at the start of the
wek. Spent a while trying to figure out how to communicate with the MSP430
over JTAG in linux, although i could only find programs that use parallel
and serial ports to transfer data rather than USB.
The decision was then made to switch from using linux to a windows machine,
this allowed us to use TI's Code Composer Studio; an IDE used to debug TI
embedded processors. This simplified the process of debugging and the
toolchain for compiling is automated.
In the last few days I worked on getting interrupt-driven serial
communication working so that the node could send data to a connected
computer. As of the end of the week it can send/recieve strings without
polling. Also managed to upload a hydra.elf to a node.

The analysis of LB diamonds was stepped through some cases and some further situations that can be resolved were found. It is suggested that the TTL value stored for the analysis be decremented for the divergence point to ensure that all relevant nodes at the same (initial) TTL are processed. It also looks like max TTL should be stored rather than min in the analysis, for a similar reason to do with order, but this will have to be tested.

For the same analysis the resulting width and length data was graphed.

The three source ports mode scamper analysis completed and a graph of the accumulation of successor counts was generated. Data comparing the LB counts for native scamper 99% vs. joint probability were also generated. A graph of average probes sent vs successors found was generated. Estimates of bit importance were generated for bit flipping.

The scamper old vs new or joint confidence was analysed by drawing CDF graphs of packet count vs probability.

Short week for me, started investigating/learning how to use the Pyramid web framework for Python to build the new front-end of AMP.

Spent the second half of the week down in Wellington at Kiwicon. Heard some great talks about the current going-ons in the local and global security industries. Very worthwhile, now I have a huge list of new tools and projects to check out. Bring on NZNOG.

Short week this week. Spent time sorting out our summer research scholarship students who started this week. Some interesting projects to follow along with.

Rest of the week was spent in Wellington at the Kiwicon conference. Lots of interesting security and hacking talks as usual. Also caught up with Jamie and the REANNZ team on Monday and saw their new toys and discussed future work and collaborations.