Rui Pedro Monteiro

Abstract
The digitalization of energy generation and distribution systems opens new opportunities for devising network operation and traffic engineering strategies capable of adapting to the energy availability and sources. Despite the potential, developing and testing new approaches are challenging in production environments. Furthermore, no simulators support such integration between the communication infrastructure and the power grid. Thus, this paper introduces Flexcomm Simulator, a tool based on ns-3 that supports developing and assessing multiple strategies toward green networking and communications driven by real-time information from the power grid (i.e., Energy Flexibility). The proof-of-concept results demonstrate this contribution's potential by implementing an energy-aware routing algorithm that adapts to real-world Energy Flexibility data in a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). Also, it showcases the simulator's capacity to deal with large-scale simulations through MPI-based distributed environments.

Abstract
With continuous technological advancement, multihomed devices are becoming common. They can connect simultaneously to multiple networks through different interfaces. However, since TCP sessions are bound to one interface per device, it hampers applications from taking advantage of all the available connected networks. This has been solved by MPTCP, introduced as a seamless extension to TCP, allowing more reliable sessions and enhanced throughput. However, MPTCP comes with an inherent risk, as it becomes easier to fragment attacks towards evading NIDS. This paper presents a study of how MPTCP can be used to evade NIDS through simple cross-path attacks. It also introduces tools to facilitate assessing MPTCP-based services in diverse network topologies using an emulation environment. Finally, a new solution is proposed to prevent cross-path attacks through uncoordinated networks. This solution consists of a hostlevel plugin that allows MPTCP sessions only through trusted networks, even in the presence of a NAT.