From 1 february 2024, Anna Sperotto has been appointed as a professor in the chair: ‘Active Network Resilience’ at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.
Resilience is, broadly said, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In the context of the Internet – an open, distributed and highly redundant architecture – one would assume that resilience almost comes for free as it is implicitly embedded in the technology. However, in practice this is far from reality. The complexity of the Internet as a whole and how dependent we are from it as a society are such that resilience now needs to be closely guarded.
Sperotto’s research focuses on assessing the resilience of the Internet, given its complexity and susceptibility to various challenges, including attacks, errors, and consolidation of services. The research aims to shift from reactive to proactive resilience by developing measurement approaches that identify indicators of potential resilience issues before resilience degradation occurs. The focus is on employing a data-driven approach to collect and analyse data related to core network infrastructure, identifying misconfigurations, points of failure, and large-scale consolidation.
Resilience encompasses more than technology, however. Resilient infrastructure should form the basis for resilient societies. The functioning of the Internet is now fully intertwined into the social fabric, a fact that brings about both advantages and risks for a range of vulnerable online groups. Think about elderly people navigating the complexities of social media, or young digital natives that are very early on proficient in handling a tablet but do not yet understand the risks. Therefore, the research extends to exploring how the resilience of online vulnerable groups can be enhanced by leveraging Internet measurements.
