My Research...

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I have spent countless sleepless nights at the Lab for Wireless networks and Security doing kernel hacking/programming and running test on a Linux Mobile IPv6 test bed. I has a been an awesome time for me despite the fact it was not a party. Kernel Hacking is tricky, tough and critical. But when things work great, you feel a great sense of achievement and reward. Big Up to my friends Sungho Maeung( programmer, South Korea), Vishal Gogula ( Programmer, India), Julie ( Computer Engineer, USA), Travis Wu (Programmer, China), Manav Gupta ( Programmer, India), Namgyal Dolker (NSA, Tibet), Vishal Mankotia ( NSA, India) for the good times we have had working together, sharing the laughs, the pizza and coke from papajohns.com,...

Center for Advancing the Study of CyberInfrastructure ( CASCI) where the LWNS is located. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York

My research areas are listed below. It's really exciting to go deep in things and try to understand how they work at both the macroscopic and microscopic scale. It requires a lot of discipline and a lot of passion and commitment. A famous French said, 'Researchers who search we find but researchers who find we search'. Very relevant to pint out that the field of research requires patience and perseverance in order to obtain results. It's a filed that requires a lot of dedication and commitment to get results.

From 2004 to May 2005, I worked as a Research Associate in the project 'Framework for seamless roaming and handover in next generation wireless networks' under Dr. Nirmala Shenoy and Professor Bruce H. Hartpence at the Laboratory for Wireless Networks and Security of the Center for Advancing the Study of CyberInfrastructure (former Laboratory for Applied Computing) at RIT. My work focused on Mobile IPV6 and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. I used kernel hacking/programming to find ways to alleviate the handover problem observed in wireless networks during roaming. It has been a beautiful, challenging and great learning curve for me. 

Before joining the lab for wireless networks and security, I worked as a graduate research assistant with Dr. Ron Vullo at the Center for Information Visualization and Interaction (CIVI) at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Science. Together with some classmates, we have developed Rachacha. Initially created as a class project by graduate students at RIT, Rachacha is built by students, for students, with content specifically developed for students in this region. We're working hard to keep improving the site and always looking for student volunteers from all Rochester area colleges. Rachacha is built with the open source Molly website development.

Now that I am working full-time, I have set up my own home network with 4 desktops and a laptop to run my simulations. It is really fun and exciting. On of my systems runs Gentoo, another one runs Windows 2003 server, one runs winXP Pro and the last one runs UbuntuLinux. I run win2k on my laptop.

My other research interests are in:

q       Ethical Hacking

An ethical hacker is a computer and network expert who attacks a security system on behalf of its owners, seeking vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit. To test a security system, ethical hackers use the same methods as their less principled counterparts, but report problems instead of taking advantage of them. Ethical hacking is also known as penetration testing, intrusion testing, and red teaming. An ethical hacker is sometimes called a white hat, a term that comes from old Western movies, where the "good guy" wore a white hat and the "bad guy" wore a black hat.

One of the first examples of ethical hackers at work was in the 1970s, when the United States government used groups of experts called red teams to hack its own computer systems. According to Ed Skoudis, Vice President of Security Strategy for Predictive Systems' Global Integrity consulting practice, ethical hacking has continued to grow in an otherwise lackluster IT industry, and is becoming increasingly common outside the government and technology sectors where it began. Many large companies, such as IBM, maintain employee teams of ethical hackers.

In a similar but distinct category, a hacktivist is more of a vigilante: detecting, sometimes reporting (and sometimes exploiting) security vulnerabilities as a form of social activism. [Source: Whatis.com]

No kidding! I have no doubt some people will ask the limits of Ethical Hacking and just hacking. Well, I believe in hacking for the sake of learning and for educational purposes. ?know your enemy in order to defend yourself?. You cannot defend a computer systems/network if you don't know zip about the black hat mind set. You need to act like the bad guys in order to protect your infrastructure from being hit. Therefore, ethical hacking is a good way to go if we can to make sure nobody is trying to intrude into the system we are protecting and nobody is trying to hurt us. I see an analogy between hacking vs ethical hacking and terrorism and counter terrorism. The agents working in a counter terrorist unit but know the ins and outs of the way terrorists think and act so that they can help prevent disasters. It is exactly the same thing in the hacker's world. The Best Defense is a Good Offense I am glad many universities have started developing courses in Ethical Hacking. At RIT, I remember a computer security course ( 580) where prof. Daryl Johnson would teach exactly what the bad guys would do and give labs where one team will play the black hats( bad guys or crackers) and another would play the white hats ( good guys or hackers). Hackers build and crackers wreck. So, if you want to know more about ethical hacking, you know what to do. Code, Google, read and read and read a lot. Of course you must hack to become a hacker. Duh!

Articles about Ethical Hacking

Ethical Hacking Is No Oxymoron 

The Pros & Cons of Ethical Hacking, By Allen Bernard

Ethical hacking: Ten crucial lessons

Networking and systems administration: Unix/Linux, Windows( windows 2003 server), Solaris.

pervasive computing,

wireless networks

Mobile IPV6:

Mobile IP is a new technology designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to allow mobile users to maintain their IP address while moving from one network to another. Mobile IP is defined in RFC 2002. ?Mobile IP is an enhancement of the Internet Protocol (IP) that adds mechanisms for forwarding Internet traffic to mobile devices (known as mobile nodes) when they are connecting through other than their home network.? I am interested in the handover problem, predictive handover scheme, and study of the mechanisms and delays at layer 2 and layer 3 during handoff using MobileIPv6 over the IPV6 test bed using Linux routers

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: Access Methods and Routing issues

Web design and development: html, xhtml, css, javascript, dhtml, xml,...

Computer system security

Databases: My research interest is in RDMS and in ODMS. MySQL is my main focus.

What is MySQL?

     MySQL is a relational database management system. It is a Open Source SQL database provided by MySQL AB. MySQL is very fast, reliable, and easy to use. It also has a very practical set of features developed in very close cooperation with our users. MySQL was originally developed to handle very large databases much faster than existing solutions and has been successfully used in highly demanding production environments for several years. Though under constant development, MySQL today offers a rich and very useful set of functions. The connectivity, speed, and security make MySQL highly suited for accessing databases on the Internet. http://www.mysql.com

Operating Systems: 

I am a great fan of the Linux operating system. I am running Linux Red Hat 9.0 in dual boot with Windows XP Professional edition on one of home desktops. Linux is a wonderful operating system. It's robust, stable and has great features for security. You can do everything you do with Windows. Also, the software comes free and the beauty of all that is the fact it is open source, meaning that you can tweak things around and make them work the way you really want. Also you have a bundle of tools you need for graphics, networking and systems, web development, games, word processing, programming, everything. Believe me! I am not doing some commercial in here for Linux but I got to be honest and tell my side of the story about the penguin operating system. Give it a shot if you came. You will see. No more BSoD as one may experience with Windows. No more crash every ten minutes. I like Windows but I looooove Linux. It's magnificent!

Besides Linux and Windows, I also work with MacOS, mainly for multimedia application and graphic design. My boss at ACR is a MacOS guy. He is the only in the office to use Mac. I also love working with Sun Solaris.
 

Programming Languages:

Programming Tutorial

  Java:

Java 101 - An introduction to Java

Neural Java, Neural Networks Tutorial with Java Applets.

Java Network Programming, 3rd Edition

The Java Programming Tutorial: Vol. 2
Classes, Threads, and Applets

Java RMI Tutorial

  C Programming:

 C Language Tutorial

 C Programming

       comp.lang.c Frequently Asked Questions

     C programming language ( wikipedia)

c++:

The cplusplus.com tutorial
Complete C++ language tutorial

C Plus Plus

C and C++ Language Syntax Reference

      C Programming and C++ Programming - Cprogramming.com

C/C++ Tutorials

Python:

Perl:

PHP: What is PHP?

SQL:

http://sqlzoo.net/

http://www.sql.org/

JavaScript:

JavaScript Tutorial

xhtml:

  XML , stands for eXtensible Markup Language

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp