Jesus Llorente Santos and Juha-Matti Tilli awarded in SoftFIRE challenge

The competition targeted original developments, experiments, trials and tests to be carried out on its virtualized and federated testbed infrastructure. The project was seeking ground breaking proposals to move these technologies one step further and solve the many issues that still are present. The challenge is an incredible opportunity for practitioners and experts of the sector to showcase how their technological solutions can improve virtualization platforms, or to show how new compelling services and applications can be developed on top of an NFV/SDN middleware.

The challenge was organized in 3 different streams: Interworking, Programmability and Security. Jesus Llorente Santos's and Juha-Matti Tilli's proposal was accepted to the latter, addressing the possible extensions to the platform for increasing the security levels offered to potential stakeholders of SoftFIRE. For each stream there were 3 prizes split in 40k, 25k and 10k euros respectively.

Their proposal featured a novel mechanism for NAT traversal based on standard DNS queries and two implementations of inline transparent TCP SYN proxies.