Muriel Figueredo Franco

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Centralization of Internet‐based services in a few key players has been a topic of study in recent years. One of such services, the domain name system (DNS), is one of the pillars of the Internet, which allows users to access websites on the Internet through easy‐to‐remember domain names rather than complex numeric IP addresses. In this DNS context...

Cybersecurity planning is challenging for digitized companies that want adequate protection without overspending money. Currently, the lack of investments and perverse economic incentives may increase the number of cyberattacks, which result in several economic impacts on companies worldwide. Therefore, cybersecurity planning has to consider techni...

A evolução das tecnologias e a crescente dependência em dispositivos digitais aumentam os riscos cibernéticos e os ciberataques, tornando essencial para a compreensão dos riscos e de seus potenciais impactos a partir de uma perspectiva técnica e econômica. Neste contexto, este artigo propõe o SIM-Ciber, uma solução para simulação de riscos e impact...

The Domain Name System (DNS) service is one of the pillars of the Internet. This service allows users to access websites on the Internet through easy-to-remember domain names rather than complex numeric IP addresses. However, the concentration of DNS service providers on the Internet affects user security, privacy, and network accessibility as the...

The Domain Name System (DNS) service is one of the pillars of the Internet. This service allows users to access websites on the Internet through easy-to-remember domain names rather than complex numeric IP addresses. However, the concentration of DNS service providers on the Internet affects user security, privacy, and network accessibility as the...

The Domain Name System (DNS) represents one of the cornerstones of the World Wide Web and plays an indispensable role in its operation. DNS is an extensive distributed database structured to resolve readable domain names for people, companies, and institutions into corresponding and reliable IP addresses. This paper presents PerfResolv, an approach...

Since the proposal of Bitcoin in 2009 and with the inclusion of the first transaction in its genesis block, Blockchains (BC) have been used to store arbitrary data, including texts, images, and documents. However, such data is often not easily discoverable in BCs and is embedded within their binary data structures. Thus, this paper presents the des...

Behavioral Fingerprinting is a technique used to understand the behavior of devices, enabling a better understanding of their functionality and improved anomaly detection. This paper proposes a methodology for generating the behavioral fingerprint of programmable switches. The methodology outlines the process of selecting metrics for analysis, extr...

O Sistema de Nomes de Domínio (DNS) representa um dos sistemas centrais para a operação da Internet. Neste artigo, apresentamos uma análise da pesquisa sobre a medição do desempenho de resolvedores públicos de DNS nos últimos cinco anos. Assim, este trabalho fornece uma visão geral do estado da arte sobre os métodos utilizados para análise do desem...

Network automation is essential for efficiently managing complex networks, enhancing reliability, and reducing human errors. This work proposes a novel approach to automate security planning and management using the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). PDDL is used to generate an action plan to mitigate imminent threats to companies’ network...

The performance of Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers is crucial, as the majority of the communication in the Internet starts with a DNS lookup to resolve a domain an IP address to reach the desired content. In this sense, the academia has been devoted to measure and analyze the performance of DNS resolvers using different tools. However, such tool...

Besides the main blockchain use-case of exchanging cryptocurrencies, Distributed Applications (DApps) can also be developed on top of such a technology. However, due to the size of popular blockchains and price, testing these DApps in a real-world environment becomes challenging. Thus, blockchain emulators were proposed to address such as issue. Th...

Elections generally involve the simple tasks of counting votes and publishing the final tally to voters. Depending on the election’s scope, these processes require sophisticated methods embedded in the electorate’s various technological and societal factors (e.g., the voting culture). An election’s integrity is the pinnacle of the trust placed in t...

Digitization increases business opportunities and the risk of companies being victims of devastating cyberattacks. Therefore, managing risk exposure and cybersecurity strategies is essential for digitized companies that want to survive in competitive markets. However, understanding company-specific risks and quantifying their associated costs is no...

The Domain Name System (DNS) service is one of the pillars of the Internet. This service allows users to access websites on the Internet through easy-to-remember domain names rather than complex numeric IP addresses. DNS acts as a directory that translates the domain names into a corresponding IP address, allowing communication between computers on...

Cybersecurity planning is challenging for digitized companies that want adequate protection without overspending money. Currently, the lack of investments and perverse economic incentives are the root cause of cyberattacks, which results in several economic impacts on companies worldwide. Therefore, cybersecurity planning has to consider technical...

Cybersecurity remains one of the key investments for companies that want to protect their business in a digital era. Therefore, it is essential to understand the different steps required to implement an adequate cybersecurity strategy, which can be viewed as a cybersecurity project to be developed, implemented, and operated. This article proposes S...

Given the growing increase in the number of blockchain (BC) platforms, cryptocurrencies, and tokens, non-technical individuals face a complex question when selecting a BC that meets their requirements (e.g. performance or security). In addition, current approaches that aid such a selection process present drawbacks (e.g. require specific BC knowled...

Blockchains (BC) and Distributed Ledgers (DL) offer favorable properties, especially immutability and decentralization, which are suitable for voting systems’ Bulletin Boards (BB). In recent years, an influx of BC-based voting systems have been observed. Distributing trust among multiple trustees is a crucial reason to adopt BCs and DLs in voting s...

Threat Modeling is a structured process to identify critical assets in an organization and the threats posed by adversarial agents. The goal of applying such a process is to achieve a shared understanding of the inherent risks and potential counter-measures that can be put in place. In practice, threat modeling is a collaborative process combining...

Cyberattacks have increased in number and severity, negatively impacting businesses and their services. As such, cybersecurity can no longer be seen just as a technological issue, but it must also be recognized as critical to the economy and society. Current solutions struggle to find indicators of unpredictable risks, limiting their ability to per...

Trust management in distributed systems has always been a topic of active interest in the research community to understand how to foster and manage aspects. In this sense, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and, among them, Blockchains (BC), emerge as an alternative for shifting trust assumptions between users to the protocol that regulates the...

The cyber insurance market is still in its infancy but growing fast. Novel models and standards for this particular insurance market are essential due to the use of modern IT (Information Technology) and since insurance providers need to create suitable models for customers.

Over the past years, Blockchain (BC) interoperability became a crucial topic of research due to the fast development of new BC platforms for many use-cases, from supply-chain to voting. The need for interoperability can be attributed to the development of such platforms that did not follow any standard, leading to the creation of BC islands that do...

For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats — especially in case of the COVID-19 pandemic — a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities...

Although the first Blockchain (BC) was proposed about a decade ago, BC achievements from a technical and functional perspective are measurable, but still face open issues. Since IFIP’s Working Group 6.6 on the “Management of Networks and Distributed System” investigated BCs in various aspects, this contribution here summarizes and clarifies key cha...

Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems allow voters to cast their votes in an uncontrolled, distributed environment. At the same time, the REV system must provide ballot privacy and verifiability of the final tally. Research has proposed REV schemes offering ballot privacy based on computational intractability assumptions, but only a few provide Un...

TC 6: Communication Systems

As the dependency of businesses on digital services increases, their vulnerability to cyberattacks increases, too. Besides providing innovative services, business owners must focus on investing in robust cybersecurity mechanisms to countermeasure cyberattacks. Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks remain one of the most dangerous cyberattack...

While the existence of Public Bulletin Boards (PBB) is often formulated as an assumption in related work on Remote Electronic Voting (REV) systems, this work here on Provotum focuses on the practical design and architecture of such a PBB, including its distributed execution. Further, Provotum leverages a public permissioned Blockchain (BC) as a PBB...

Businesses were moving during the past decades to-ward full digital models, which made companies face new threatsand cyberattacks affecting their services and, consequently, theirprofits. To avoid negative impacts, companies’ investments incybersecurity are increasing considerably. However, Small andMedium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) operate on small...

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are one of the major causes of concerns for communication service providers. When an attack is highly sophisticated and no countermeasures are available directly, sharing hardware and defense capabilities become a compelling alternative. Future network and service management can base its operations on eq...

Trust in electoral processes is fundamental for democracies. Further, the identity management of citizen data is crucial, because final tallies cannot be guaranteed without the assurance that every final vote was cast by an eligible voter. In order to establish a basis for a hybrid public verifiability of voting, this work (1) introduces Proverum,...

In the last years, cryptocurrencies have becomeincreasingly popular along with their underlying distributedledger technology, referred to as a Blockchain (BC). Nowadays,a wide variety of BC implementations are available. However,the selection of a suitable implementation for a particularapplication or use case is complex because it requires technic...

For the protection of people and society against harm and health threats -- especially for the COVID-19 pandemic -- a variety of different disciplines needs to be involved. The data collection of very basic and health-related data of individuals in today's highly mobile society does help to plan, protect, and identify next steps health authorities...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) presents several advantages over traditional network architectures, such as flexibility, security, and reduced CAPEX/OPEX. In traditional middleboxes, network functions are usually executed on specialized hardware (e.g., firewall, DPI). Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on the other hand, are executed on commod...

Academic certificates have a significant influence on the job market, proving a particular competence or skill of a recipient. However, the ability to verify the authenticity of certificates does not follow its relevance in the labor market, causing several companies to exploit this inefficiency to falsify information or even to make fake certifica...

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) presents several advantages over traditional network architectures, such as flexibility, security, and reduced CAPEX/OPEX. In traditional middleboxes, network functions are usually executed on specialised hardware (e.g., firewall, DPI). Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on the other hand, are executed on commod...

Current projects applying blockchain technology to enhance the trust of NFV environments do not consider the VNF repository. However, the blockchain’s properties can enhance trust by allowing to verify a VNF package’s integrity without relying (a) on a Trusted Third Party (TTP) for remote attestation or (b) a secure database. This paper presents BU...

Cybersecurity concerns are one of the significant side effects of an increasingly interconnected world, which inevitably put economic factors into perspective, either directly or indirectly. In this context, it is imperative to understand the significant dependencies between complex and distributed systems (e.g., supply-chain), as well as security...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) decouples the network package performed by network functions from dedicated hardware appliance by running Virtual Network Functions (VNF) on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. Network operators can create customized network services by chaining multiple VNFs, defining a so-called Service Function Chaining (SFC...

Cyberattacks are the cause of several damages on governments and companies in the last years. Such damage includes not only leaks of sensitive information, but also economic loss due to downtime of services. The security market size worth billions of dollars, which represents investments to acquire protection services and training response teams to...

In Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), service providers create customized network services by chaining Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in forwarding graphs, according to individual client demands. Despite the flexibility promoted by the NFV paradigm, specific VNFs used in network services may become bottlenecks due to a number of factors, e.g...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is transforming the way in which network operators acquire and manage network services. By using virtualization technologies to move packet processing from dedicated hardware to software, NFV has introduced a new market focused on the offer and distribution of Virtual Network Functions (VNF). Infrastructure Pr...

The emergence of NFV has drawn the attention of academia, standardization bodies, and industry, because of the possibility of reducing capital and operational costs while introducing innovation in computer networks. To enable developers to independently publish and distribute VNFs, marketplaces akin to online application stores are essential. Resea...

In this demo, we present FENDE: Marketplace and Federated Ecosystem for the Distribution and Execution of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) and for the creation of Service Function Chains (SFCs). The FENDE ecosystem enables the distribution of both network functions and services in a manner that is akin to marketplaces found in mobile platforms...

Um dos principais desafios da Virtualização de Funções de Rede (NFV) é o gerenciamento do ciclo de vida de funções de rede. Atualmente, as soluções para o gerenciamento de Funções Virtualizadas de Rede (VNFs) são complexas e necessitam de um entendimento profundo de detalhes da infraestrutura subjacente. Este trabalho propõe uma arquitetura para a...

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is driving a paradigm shift in telecommunications networks, fostering new business models and creating innovation opportunities. In NFV-enabled networks, Service Providers (SPs) have the opportunity to build a business model where tenants can purchase Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that provide distinct netw...

Many aspects of the management of computer networks, such as quality of service and security, must be taken into consideration to ensure that the network meets the users and clients demands. Fortunately, management solutions were developed to address these aspects, such as Intent-Based Networking (IBN). IBN is a novel networking paradigm that abstr...