prof.dr.ir. A. Pras (Aiko)

Professor in Internet Security
a.pras@utwente.nl
+31534893778
Business card

Aiko Pras is full professor in the area of Network Operations and Management with a focus on Internet Security at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He is member of the Design and Analysis of Communication Systems Group (DACS). In 1995 he received a Ph.D. degree from the same university for his thesis titled "Network Management Architectures" and in 2013 he was appointed as full professor. In 2016 he has been honoured with the IFIP/IEEE “Salah Aidarous Memorial Award” for providing unremitting service and dedication to the IT and Telecommunications Network Operations and Management community.

Aiko is interested in questions like Digital Independence and Internet security, with a research focus on DDoS attacks and DNS security. His approach is usually based on measurements.

He is research coordinator of the EU Concordia project, which is one of the three Cybersecurity Competence Networks within Europe. He is "Beirat" of the  CODE Cybersecurity research institute in München, member of the SURF Scientific Technical Council (WTR) and board member of the Dutch chapter of the Internet Society (isoc.nl). He has chaired the IFIP Technical Committee on "Communications Systems" (IFIP-TC6, 2013-2017), as well as the EU Future Internet cluster (2012-2014). He has been coordinator of the European Network of Excellence on "Management of the Future Internet" (FLAMINGO, 2012-2017). 

He has participated in many European and Dutch research projects, as member, evaluator and as reviewer. He has contributed to research and standardization activities as a founding member of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) Network Management Research Group (NMRG) and as RFC author. He has been editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine series on "Network & Service Management", associate editor of the International Journal of Network Management (IJNM), and Editorial Advisory Board member for the Journal of Network and Systems Management (JNSM). He is Steering Committee member of the IFIP/IEEE NOMS and IM Symposia (NISC), CNSM, IFIP Networking as well as TMA.

 

Current PhD students

He is currently supervisor of the following Ph.D. students (see the page on Research for a list of past students)

  • Morteza Karimzadeh:  Mobility Management in the Future Mobile networks. 
    Start: 1/03/2013
  • Jessica Steinberger: Distributed DDoS Defense - A collaborative Approach at Internet Scale. 
    Start: 13/01/2014 (Joint with University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt)
  • Luuk Hendriks: Security of IPv6. 
    Start: 01/04/2014 
  • Christian Dietz: Early Botnet Detection. 
    Start: 01/07/2014 (Joint PhD with the Universität der Bundeswehr München)
  • Mathijs Jonker: DDoS Mitigation. 
    Start: 01/10/2014
  • Wouter de Vries: Using Anycast to mitigate DDoS attacks. 
    Start: 01/07/2015
  • Moritz Muller: 
    Start: 01/04/2017 (External from SIDN)
  • Olivier van der Toorn: Threat Identification Using Active DNS Measurements
    Start: 15/09/2017
  • Nils Rodday: 
    Start: 01/11/2017 (Joint PhD with the Universität der Bundeswehr München)

Organisations

Aiko Pras' research focuses on the detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks, DNS security and, more general, Internet security. Topics that his Ph.D. students are working on include amongst others booters, IPv6 security, anycast techniques as well as DNS data analyses (for details, see below).  The approach taken is often measurement-based, including flow (IPFIX) measurement. My earlier research focussed on network management technologies.

Other contributions

Past PhD students

Other PhD students (external supervision and committee)

  • Nikolay Melnikov, Jacobs University Bremen (planned: 2013)
  • Robert Koch, UniBW, Munchen, 25-11-2011
  • Lien Deboosere, Ghent University, 14-9-2011
  • Eduardo Silva, University of Twente, 11-5-2011
  • Piotr Zuraniewski, University of Amstedrdam, 11-3-2011
  • Emmanuele Zambon, University of Twente, 20-1-2011
  • Christian Morariu, University of Zurich, 07-2010
  • Radu State, Universite Henri Poincare, Nancy, 7-12-2009 (Habilitation)
  • Bruno Van Den Bossche, Universiteit Gent, 11-9-2009
  • Assed Jehangir, University of Twente, 9-4-2009
  • Peter Racz, University of Zurich, 29-2-2008
  • Abdelkader Lahmadi, Universite Nancy, 11-12-2007

Research profiles

My teaching activities are focused on the  Cyber Security specialization of the Computer Science master programme, a cooperation of the Dutch 4TU Federation and the master programme of Internet Science and Technology (former Telematics master). 

Affiliated study programs

Aiko Pras has many years of experience in European projects, as reviewer for projects like Alicante, Aragorn, AutoI, COMET, Efipsans, Envision, Scampi and MOME, as evaluator of FP6 projects, and as member within projects like FLAMINGO, SALUS, UNIVERSELF, EMANICS, Candle, Cassiopeia, PANGLOSS and SEDOS. He is also leader of the EU Future Internet Cluster.

Current projects

D3: Distributed Denial of Service Defense

Protecting schools and other public organizations

The goal of this project is to develop an architecture to detect and mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on public organizations, e.g., schools. Since summer 2013 the number of such attacks has increased rapidly, primarily due to availability of booters, i.e., web-based facilities that offer “DDoS-as-a-service”. Booters find their origins within the Internet gaming community, and can be used for a few euros by people without any technical skills. Since booters use general Internet services such as DNS and NTP to amplify their attacks, they can operate without an underlying botnet.

Finished projects

Flamingo

Network and service management

Flamingo is a European (ICT-FP7 Network of Excellence) Project focussing on Network and Service Management. The goals of FLAMINGO are to strongly integrate the research of leading European research groups in the area of network and service management, to strengthen the European and worldwide research in this area, and to bridge the gap between scientific research and industrial application.

Dutch (and also international) media consult Aiko Pras on a regular basis concerning internet security, DDos attacks and other related topics.

In the press

A selection of news items:

News on utwente.nl

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