UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES

Service Télématique et Communication Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance Newsletter The New Paths of Knowledge

N° 10 May 1997

*Editorial*	*ADVISER workshop*	*BRUXELLES FORMATION*
*Collaboration with BELGACOM*	*EuroSinet / EWOS event*	*GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE*
*GINA*	*MIRTO*	*New contract with AED*
*NEW MIND*	*Security consultancy for CIK*	*SunNet Manager Platform*

Editorial: a little too much material to publish ...

Here is no. 10 of our Newsletter and for the first time our Editor, Nadia PARONI, has had to hold some material ready for publication, until our next issue (since we don't want - yet? to print more than six pages ...)
So you will not read in this number about our participation in the new ETSI project on voice over IP, nor about our new Internet connection through the cable TV operator BRUTELE, and UNISOURCE.
But you will read about many of our activities, and also discover yet more new faces of the group, including Denis AUQUIER who joined in February and Ebrahim N. MASHAYEKH who is visiting us for six months, on leave from Tehran.
Still progressing on the New Paths of Knowledge ...

Paul VAN BINST

ps: for those who look at these details, here is another issue of the Newsletter without a picture of myself ...


A strong STC delegation attended the JENC8 Conference in Edinburgh: E.N.MASHAYEKH, R. NAJMABADI KIA, M. DE PRETER, F. DABBARH, E. CHIRAZI and D. AUQUIER	The first EuroChinatel Conference took place in Beijing, co-organized by the European Commission and the Chinese government; Paul VAN BINST chaired a session on Telematics in Education

Collaboration with BELGACOM

In the context of two contracts(ULB and VUB) with Belgacom, two "hot" topics have been addressed. The first one has consisted in studying the possibility to provide secure messaging services on Internet and more specifically in relation with the transport of EDI on Internet. There are indeed several solutions defined or being defined in the Internet community that enable to secure message transport. Such solutions apply as well at the transport level (e.g. SSL over TCP) to authenticate host systems and to encrypt the whole SMTP, POP or IMAP dialog, as at the message contents level with PEM, MOSS, S/MIME, PGP, PGP/MIME. SMTP, POP and IMAP are themselves being enhanced to provide authentication between hosts. Apart from the problems arising from the existence of many competitive solutions, other aspects have to be dealt with, such as the necessity to set up an infrastructure for the storage and distribution of certificates, or the procedures to be set up for the registration and certification of users.

The second topic concerned the Directory Services on the Internet. The directory services that have been investigated are a yellow pages service directory and a white pages people and company directory with a geographical basis. It has essentially consisted in a feasibility study to find out how to design a service based on X.500. In the framework of this collaboration, STC has participated, in the name of BELGACOM, to the EURESCOM Project P416 which aimed at setting up a pilot infrastructure for a white-pages directory service among European telecom operators.

GINA

NEW MIND

The GINA project began in July 96, aiming at the production and dissemination of Guidelines about network evolution, interoperability and ATM deployment, in the scope of the EC ACTS programme.

A first set of draft guidelines were produced and presented in the Rennes Workshop on "Broadband network deployment and its impact on information society" which took place on 25-27 March 97. These guidelines are available on the GINA web server at "gina.iihe.ac.be"; they are updated regularly as the work progresses. A new set of updated and revised guidelines will be presented at the "2nd International Distributed Conference on Network Interoperability" on 16-18 June 97 in Madeira, Portugal. More detailed information on the Madeira conference can be obtained at "www.telscom.ch/madeira".

Service Télématique et Communication has been contracted by the New Mind company to integrate a personal distance learning system (IBM PLS) with an ISDN H.320 videoconferencing system (PictureTel), used over ATM with FVC equipments.

This project is being conducted for the Dutch Army, under the sponsoring of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.

New contract with AED

GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE

Service Télématique et Communication is currently working on the second phase of a project with the "Administration de l'Equipement et des Déplacements" of the Brussels-Capital Region.
This project aims to establish a large broadband videosurveillance network, based on ATM and IP, in tunnels of Brussels.
Various scenarios are currently evaluated and investigated.

Service Télématique et Communication has been contracted by Global Knowledge Network to deliver seminars : one on Performance Management, and the other one on Security Management. Each one has a duration of two days, and they are focused on only one operating system (Digital Unix V4).
Those two seminars have been given in April, at GKN's offices in Brussels, and they are to be conducted again, at the same location, in September and October 1997.

A lot of activities in the EuroDemo room

EuroSinet / EWOS event

During the week of 12 May a combined EuroISnet - EWOS activity on X.500 interoperability testing took place in our EuroDemo room. X.500 interoperability testing is a major activity in the EuroSInet workshops which regularly take place in many places around Europe and elsewhere. There exists a long standing collaboration between EuroISnet and the EWOS Expert Group on Conformance Testing (EGCT). As EGCT was planning interoperability and capability demonstration facilities, a first step towards the realisation of those plans was this first collaborative demonstration effort between EuroISnet and EWOS. The EuroDemo room was chosen for this activity for the good networking and infrastructure it offered to the participants.

During the week-long event, Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems, ISODE, ISOCOR, ICL and UTIMACO were testing interoperability between their X.500 implementations.

On Wednesday afternoon delegates to the EWOS TA joined the demonstrators. They listened to explanations about the ongoing activity and could then look at the tests. A glass of champagne, jointly sponsored by EWOS, ULB and VUB, closed the afternoon.

ADVISER workshop

A series of seminars/workshops by projects of the Telematics for Research has been scheduled in the EuroDemo room. The first workshop was organised by the project ADVISER and took place on Monday May 26. About ten persons attended and made successfully use of the EuroDemo facilities and equipment. ADVISER provides services to facilitate access to research results and activities to a wide user community in order to encourage technology transfer and exploitation.

Among the many other activities taking place in the EuroDemo room, here is a technical presentation by Eric MANNIE of STC, to members of the Belgian ATM platform.

Using the SunNet Manager Platform to monitor European ATM activities

The SunNet Manager platform is a powerful tool for monitoring and statistics collection of SNMP based networks like Ethernet, FDDI, Internet and ATM.
The platform is used since a few years for performance monitoring of our internal network as well as in different projects like TERENA ATM Task Force in 1995, EuroDemo and Task Force TF-TEN in 1997. There are some details about the SunNet Manager TEN-34 view which is one of our current projects. TEN-34 stands for Trans-European Network interconnect at 34 M bit/s which is the new high speed network for National Research Networks in Europe. One interesting feature of the platform is used here: the Management console can be used by many users simultaneously through the remote X window sessions. The users are the network experts from the different countries who participate in TEN-34 experiments.
Thus a remote X window session enables on-line management view of TEN-34 ATM switches of National Research Networks participating in the TEN-34 project. These ATM switches participate in tests as edge devices of the TEN-34 ATM Overlay network.
The communication between the Manager platform and ATM switches is realized through the traditional Internet with SNMP with agent entities using SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 and the manager entity using SNMPv1. Besides this, SNMP communication through the ATM Overlay network was tested between ULB/STC and UKERNA, United Kingdom.

TEN-34 View on SunNet Manager: ATM edge devices participating in TEN-34 experiment

R. NAJMABADI KIA installing the software on the DANTE booth at the JENC8 Conference

Launch of TEN-34

The formal launch of TEN-34 took place in Cambridge on May 20 and was broadcasted on the Internet. The launch could be followed from the EuroDemo room. For this purpose an ATM connection at a speed of 850 Kbps was set up between the EuroDemo room and the MERCI headquarters at University College London. Simon Holland from the European Commission followed the launch in EuroDemo and took actively part in the discussion between the MERCI partners, which was arranged as part of the program. The broadcast initially suffered from a few technical problems due to the late delivery of the ISDN line in Cambridge. Once the broadcasting in Cambridge was correctly set up, the reception in the EuroDemo room was of a very good quality.

Security consultancy for CIK

MIRTO

CIK (Caisse Interbancaire - Interbankaire Kassa) have the desire to acquire some Internet connectivity. They already have a Web site (http://www.cik.be/), but it is hosted by some service provider. For obvious reasons, they want to host this site themselves, along with a more general connectivity for their employees (e-mail, Web access, ...)

As the CIK holds some very sensitive data, they were aware that a good firewall would be an interesting investment. They asked STC to provide some consultancy about this would-be firewall. They asked us also how to put some security on their existing connections with their clients : these clients access CIK's on line applications through a variety of media : TCP/IP over leased lines and ISDN, X.25 through leased lines and Belgacom's X.25 PSTN, and some other means.

We established a filtering policy for a packet-filtering firewall. However, such firewalls do not protect against some security flaws of the protocols, and we evaluated some application-level firewalls. These firewalls are the best ever built for the moment. The principle is quite simple : the advertised Web (or FTP, or whatever) server is the firewall machine. When it gets a request, the firewall inspects it to see if it is harmless, then forwards it to the real Web server, inside the protected area. The real server sends the answer to the firewall, which in turn sends this answer to the Internet. In this manner, the only visible machine is the firewall, and it contains no sensitive data, and is heavily protected from any known attack.

CIK looked quite satisfied with the schemes we proposed. It was a great pleasure to work with them : they were very aware that security is important, and they fully agreed with Computer Security's Golden Rule : everything that is not explicitly allowed, must be forbidden.

In the middle of the winter , STC members, Collaborators and partners gathered together to warm up during one of our fabulous parties, this time in the beautiful salons of Hotel Metropol.

In the scope of the EC MIRTO project (Telematics for Administrations) and in collaboration with Alcatel and the CIRB (Centre Informatique pour la Région Bruxelloise), Service Télématique et Communication developed a gateway allowing to access the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre district teletext pages through a World Wide Web interface.

The goal of that gateway is to allow an easier access to a wider audience (only people connected to the Woluwe-Saint-Pierre cable TV operator may access the teletext pages). Moreover, the WWW allows to offer services that are not possible with teletext.

The first phase of the project ended in April and consisted in the realisation of a feasibility study. The second phase (currently underway) consists in the implementation of the chosen solution.

BRUXELLES FORMATION

Bruxelles Formation (IBFFP), the French-speaking organisation in charge of vocational training in the Brussels-Capital Region is managing a project entitled "Modern Communication Systems to Support SMEs". The objective of the project, co-financed by the European Union under the ADAPT Intitiative, is to help workers in Small-and-Medium-sized Enterprises access vocational training and adapt to new technology by :

- setting up a database about SMEs in Europe via Internet,
- setting up a database about training materials and providers via Internet,
- setting up a "Technology Club", a meeting point for SMEs in Brussels and abroad,
- setting up a discussion Forum for SMEs via Internet to encourage exchange of technical and commercial information,
- providing customised training using New Learning Technologies.

The Brussels partners of IBFFP are Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Service Télématique et Communication), Technopol and Teleport Brussels.

The transnational partners are Akademie Für Unternehmensfürung (Germany), Istituto per lo Sviluppo della Formazione, Organizzazione e Ricerca (Italy), Newham College of Further Education (U.K.) and Keski-Uudenmaan AikuiskoulutusKeskus (Finland) (as an observer partner).
The information collected from SMEs in Brussels and in our partner countries regarding their activities and training needs will be on line as of mid June.
The Technology Club will be set up and fully operative also as of mid June.
The web site is hosted by ULB, Service Télématique et Communication at: http://www.iihe.ac.be/Bxl_Formation.

Further information is available on +32 2 626 78 54.

MEMBERS of SERVICE TELEMATIQUE ET COMMUNICATION

Denis AUQUIER, Frédéric BRAS, Justin CASTERA, Ehsan CHIRAZI,
Marc DE PRETER, Faïrouz DABBARH, Eric MANNIE, Ebrahim N. MASHAYEKH,
Ramin NAJMABADI KIA, Olivier PARIDAENS, Nadia PARONI,
Robab SATTARI SADAT, Paul VAN BINST, Jean-Marc VERBERGT.

Our ULB Student Collaborators:

Jean-Pierre FLORISOONE, Olivier VERLOOVE.

Our VUB Collaborators:

Zlatica CEKRO, Rosette VANDENBROUCKE.
(for all of the above, e-mail is
surname@helios.iihe.ac.be or c=be; admd=rtt; prmd=iihe; o=helios; s=surname)

Other regular collaborators:

Atika COHEN, Marie-Paule SPINETTE, Anne SPOIDEN (ULB Libraries), Yves BRANTS, Guy DEPIESSE, Daisy PIRNAY, Georges ROUSSEAU (IIHE/ULB-VUB),
Philippe LANGENAKEN, Nathalie MESSORI (Haute Ecole Francisco FERRER),
Alain NYS (City of Brussels' Education Department).

Contact:

Service Télématique et Communication - Professor Paul VAN BINST
ULB - CP230 - Boulevard du Triomphe
1050 Brussels - Belgium
Tel.: + 32 2 629 3211 or 3209 - Fax: + 32 2 629 3816
Rosette VANDENBROUCKE
VUB - ELEM - Pleinlaan 2 - 1050 Brussels - Belgium
Tel.: + 32 2 629 3210 - Fax: + 32 2 629 3816

World Wide Web Address

http://www.iihe.ac.be