@inbook {54, title = {Email Shape Analysis}, booktitle = {Distributed Computing and Networking: 11th International Conference, ICDCN 2010, Kolkata, India, January 3-6, 2010. Proceedings}, year = {2010}, pages = {18{\textendash}29}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, organization = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, address = {Berlin, Heidelberg}, abstract = {

Email has become an integral part of everyday life. Without a second thought we receive bills, bank statements, and sales promotions all to our inbox. Each email has hidden features that can be extracted. In this paper, we present a new mechanism to characterize an email without using content or context called Email Shape Analysis. We explore the applications of the email shape by carrying out a case study; botnet detection and two possible applications: spam filtering, and social-context based finger printing. Our in-depth analysis of botnet detection leads to very high accuracy of tracing templates and spam campaigns. However, when it comes to spam filtering we do not propose new method but rather a complementing method to the already high accuracy Bayesian spam filter. We also look at its ability to classify individual senders in personal email inbox{\textquoteright}s.

}, isbn = {978-3-642-11322-2}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-11322-2_7}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11322-2_7}, author = {Sroufe, Paul and Phithakkitnukoon, Santi and Ram Dantu and Cangussu, Jo{\~a}o}, editor = {Kant, Krishna and Pemmaraju, Sriram V. and Sivalingam, Krishna M. and Wu, Jie} } @article {72, title = {Experiences During a Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition}, journal = {Journal of Applied Security Research}, volume = {5}, year = {2010}, pages = {382{\textendash}396}, abstract = {

The objective of this article is to encourage schools to participate in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) and to ease their entry by providing information about the event and describing the experiences of both the student participants and the educators. This article focuses mainly on the recent experience of a University of North Texas student team at the Southwest Regional CCDC 2008 hosted by Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas. It describes the entire process of participating in the CCDC, including announcements, team formation, task assignments, preparations, and actual team experience during the competition and provides suggestions on strategies for future competitions

}, keywords = {Cyber defense competition, network configurations, operating systems, servers}, author = {Sroufe, Paul and Tate, Steve and Ram Dantu and Cankaya, Ebru} } @conference {29, title = {Email Shape Analysis for Spam Botnet Detection}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Conference on Consumer Communications and Networking Conference}, year = {2009}, publisher = {IEEE Press}, organization = {IEEE Press}, address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA}, abstract = {

Botnets have become the major sources of spamming, which generates massive unwanted traffic on networks. An effective detection mechanism can greatly mitigate the problem. In this paper, we present a novel botnet detection mechanism based on the email "shape" analysis that relies on neither content nor reputation analysis. Shape is our new way of characterizing an email by mimicking human visual inspection. A set of email shapes are derived and then used to generate a botnet signature. Our preliminary results show greater than 80\% classification accuracy (without considering email content or reputation analysis). This work investigates the discriminatory power of email shape, for which we believe will be a significant complement to other existing techniques such as a network behavior analysis.

}, isbn = {978-1-4244-2308-8}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1700527.1700792}, author = {Sroufe, Paul and Phithakkitnukoon, Santi and Ram Dantu and Cangussu, Jo{\~a}o} } @conference {90, title = {Experiences in building a multi-university testbed for research in multimedia communications}, booktitle = {Parallel and Distributed Processing, 2008. IPDPS 2008. IEEE International Symposium on}, year = {2008}, month = {April}, abstract = {

The next generation Internet needs to support multimedia services such as voice/video over IP (VoIP) and IP-based television (IPTV) and media distribution. The goal of the project is to develop a testbed for understanding and analysis of vulnerabilities of IP-based multimedia networks. This is a collaborative project between University of North Texas, Columbia University, Purdue University, and University of California at Davis. This project was awarded in 2006 and in one year, we have developed a multi-university testbed with variety of PBX solutions including Asterisk, a multitude of voice and video IP phones, and multiple universities were connected through a secure VPN and Internet!. As with any endeavor, experiences and we have many unique issues, which sometimes cause setbacks. We have dealt with issues concerning interoperability between phones and servers, network address translation (NAT) connectivity issues, and many other collaboration issues concerning people and technology. An interworking of students from multiple universities, faculty, system administrators and support personnel has brought the testbed resources together for a working environment. In this paper we described our progress and experiences in more detail and how to fulfill our mission statement while supporting the various collaborative efforts involved with this project. In addition, we described the current research activities based on the testbed. Finally we described the next steps in the testbed development.

}, keywords = {Asterisk, Collaboration, Collaborative work, digital television, Internet telephony, IP-based television, IPTV, media distribution, Multimedia communication, Multimedia communications, multiuniversity testbed, Network address translation, network address translation connectivity issues, Network servers, next generation Internet, open systems, PBX solutions, phones-servers interoperability, private telephone exchanges, Testing, TV, video IP phones, video over IP, virtual private network, virtual private networks, voice over IP, Web and internet services}, doi = {10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536392}, author = {Ram Dantu and Schulzrinne, Henning and Sroufe, Paul} }