RUBEN TORRES

Ph.D. Student
School of Electrical and
Computer Engineering

Purdue University

rtorresg AT purdue DOT edu

Short Bio

I'm a third year Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at Purdue University. I'm part of the Internet Systems Lab, leaded by Sanjay Rao. My research interest includes the design, implementation and evaluation of large scale distributed systems with emphasis in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and security.

I'm originally from Panama. I obtained my BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the University of Panama in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, I worked at Panama for Centauri Technologies Corporation, a technology consulting company. I also worked as a lecturer for Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá. I came to Purdue University in 2004 and obtained my MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006, working with my current advisor.

Here is a copy of my resumé and CV.

Projects

  1. Detecting anomalies in peer-to-peer networks

    We seek to design algorithms to monitor traffic of peer-to-peer systems, and detect deviant traffic behavior. The motivation is two fold: (i) Normal behavior in peer-to-peer applications exhibit characteristics similar to an Internet worm (high failure ratio, many-to-many download profile and common substrings among many packets). This is a common cause for false positives; (ii) Software bugs, design limitations, and DDoS reflector attacks exploiting peer-to-peer systems, may lead to undesirable traffic patterns. To address these issues, we are currently: (i) Characterizing traffic of peer-to-peer systems with regard to metrics used in anomaly detection based on data collected from operational peer-to-peer systems, and analyzing system behavior under scale and churn; and (ii) Studying the implication for traffic characteristics for detection algorithms.

  2. DDoS Resistant peer-to-peer System Design

    We are investigating peer-to-peer systems architectures that may be robust to exploits were regular clients are used to launch DDoS attacks on the Internet. We are designing and evaluating defenses for robust peer-to-peer system and identifying key principles that must guide the design of membership management algorithms.

  3. Enabling Confidentiality in an Overlay Broadcasting System

Most prior work on the use of key management algorithms to enable confidentiality of video delivery has been conducted in the context of IP Multicast. We consider the unique challenges and opportunities of integrating key management algorithms in an overlay multicast system. We conducted a systematic and extensive performance evaluation of strategies for key dissemination in the context of an operational overlay broadcasting system on the Planetlab testbed using real traces of join/leave dynamics. We found that leveraging TCP in each hop of the overlay dissemination structure can significantly simplify reliable key dissemination. We also found that using two specialized dissemination structures, one for data and one for keys, potentially achieves low overhead for key dissemination without sacrificing application performance.

Publications

Conferences and Workshops

  1. Inferring Undesirable Behavior from P2P Traffic Analysis, Ruben Torres, Mohammad Hajjat, Sanjay Rao, Maurizio Munafo and Marco Mellia. In proceedings of ACM SIGMETRICS, Seattle, WA, June 2009. [PDF] [PPT]
  2. DDoS Attacks by Subverting Membership Management in P2P Systems, Xin Sun, Ruben Torres and Sanjay Rao, Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSec), Beijing, China, October 2007. [PDF]
  3. Enabling Confidentiality of Data Delivery in an Overlay Broadcasting System, Ruben Torres, Xin Sun, Aaron Walters, Cristina Nita-Rotaru and Sanjay Rao. In proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Anchorage, AK, May 2007. [PDF] [PPT]

Journals

  1. On the Feasibility of Exploiting P2P Systems to Launch DDoS Attacks, Xin Sun, Ruben Torres and Sanjay Rao. In Journal on Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. Springer, April 2009. [PDF]
  2. Enabling Confidentiality of Data Delivery in an Overlay Broadcasting System, Ruben Torres, Xin Sun, Aaron Walters, Cristina Nita-Rotaru and Sanjay Rao. In special issue of IEEE JSAC on Advances in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems, December 2007. [PDF]

Technical Reports

  1. Inferring Undesirable Behavior from P2P Traffic Analysis, Ruben Torres, Mohammad Hajjat, Sanjay Rao, Maurizio Munafo and Marco Mellia. Technical Report TR-ECE-08-10, Purdue University, December 2008.
  2. Preventing DDoS Attacks with P2P Systems through Robust Membership Management, Xin Sun, Ruben Torres and Sanjay Rao. Technical Report TR-ECE-07-13, Purdue University, February 2007. [PDF]

Posters and Works in Progress

  1. Enhancing Resilience of P2P Systems to DDoS Reflector Attacks, Poster paper in Proceedings of ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM), Seattle, WA, August 2008. [PDF]
  2. The Case for DDoS Resistant Membership Management in P2P Systems, Work In Progress, in the 21st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Washington, USA, October 2007. [PPT]

Last update: October 7, 2009 11:33 AM