Academic Papers 2021

Here is some interesting papers I’ve read this year.

Weaponizing Middleboxes for TCP Reflected Amplification

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-bock.pdf

This paper uses the fact that some middleboxes are non-compliant TCP stacks. In particular, middleboxes sometimes see only one side of a connection and as a result, it’s possible that they answer spoofed packets. After an initial training (with a genetic algorithm) on a subset of known censoring networks to optimize amplification factors, the authors present the results of applying this to the whole IPv4 internet.

Xor Filters: Faster and Smaller Than Bloom and Cuckoo Filters

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.08258

A bit like bloom filters, but read-only, more compact and faster. The companion blog post is a good introduction: https://lemire.me/blog/2019/12/19/xor-filters-faster-and-smaller-than-bloom-filters/.

To be continued

I’ll update this page through 2021 if I want to share other papers. In the meantime, here are other posts listing papers:

• https://ordep.dev/posts/my-favorite-papers
• https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love
• https://github.com/facundoolano/software-papers