Seminars and Events

Cybersecurity Seminar Series

Network Systems Research

Event Details

Talk Abstract:

Networked distributed systems research by Dr. Gurkan’s lab is enabled by advanced orchestration methods and modern virtualization technologies. During the talk, a sample of ongoing research and education initiatives will be presented. Each research project is conducted on a realistic network with a repeatable experimentation framework for analysis and feasibility studies. Her holistic work resulted in individualized hands-on lab modules with advanced instructional tools for network security curriculum on protocol trust points and protocol behavior observations. Furthermore, novel graph representations are developed to create network mapping for effective and precise allocations of usage requests onto existing resources. Network functions provide custom behavior that answer specific needs. Deployment location and capabilities of network functions are of interest to provide resilience against cybersecurity breaches and network impairments. Her research resulted in paired network function insertion methods and the associated feasibility analysis for achieving network security and resilience. Application packet traces are used in an expert system developed in her lab to create high fidelity traffic models. Application agnostic traffic models can provide the custom traffic generation capability much needed for what-if analysis in enterprise and cybersecurity systems while preserving the privacy of captured traffic. The models are then used to generate realistic application traffic on any network topology for network and protocol testing, enterprise network provisioning, and cybersecurity systems.

Speaker Bio

Deniz Gurkan received her BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey, in 1996 and 1998, respectively. Her PhD is also in Electrical Engineering, received from the University of Southern California in 2003. She worked as a lecturer at the California State University in Long Beach, Electrical Engineering and the Claremont Graduate University, Applied Mathematics. She joined the faculty at the University of Houston in 2004 and since then, her research has evolved into sensor networking, distributed systems, network measurements, network infrastructure, and software-defined networks. She is the director of UH Networking Lab which has a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) testbed where networking research is conducted with modern software development practices. Her recent research interests are on network security, distributed system design, network traffic modeling, and network function design and development. Her research has been funded by federal programs and industry, resulting in over 60 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals. She is the faculty advisor of the UH Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) student chapter.

Networking Lab at University of Houston:  https://uh.edu/tech/netlab/

 

ISI Talk Host:  Terry Benzel, Networking and Cybersecurity Division

Talk POC:  Matt Binkley, Networking and Cybersecurity Division