Nils Agne Nordbotten

• Lopes, Roberto Rigolin F.; Loevenich, Johannes F.; Wrona, Konrad; Rettore, Paulo H. L.; Nordbotten, Nils Agne & Falkcrona, Jerry [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2023). Accelerating NATO Transformation with SnTEE: Experiments with Network Security Function Virtualization in Coalition Networks. In Lenk, Peter (Eds.), 2023 International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems (ICMCIS) : held in Skopje, North Macedonia 16–17 May 2023. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). ISSN 9798350343854. doi: 10.1109/ICMCIS59922.2023.10253524. Full text in Research Archive
• Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Mancini, Federico; Haakseth, Raymond & Engelstad, Paal E. (2017). Data Leakage Prevention for Secure Cross-Domain Information Exchange. IEEE Communications Magazine. ISSN 0163-6804. 55(10), p. 37–43. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2017.1700235. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Cross-domain information exchange is an increasingly important capability for conducting efficient and secure operations, both within coalitions and within single nations. A data guard is a common cross-domain sharing solution that inspects the security labels of exported data objects and validates that they are such that they can be released according to policy. While we see that guard solutions can be implemented with high assurance, we find that obtaining an equivalent level of assurance in the correctness of the security labels easily becomes a hard problem in practical scenarios. Thus, a weakness of the guard-based solution is that there is often limited assurance in the correctness of the security labels. To mitigate this, guards make use of content checkers such as dirty word lists as a means of detecting mislabeled data. To improve the overall security of such cross-domain solutions, we investigate more advanced content checkers based on the use of machine learning. Instead of relying on manually specified dirty word lists, we can build data-driven methods that automatically infer the words associated with classified content. However, care must be taken when constructing and deploying these methods as naive implementations are vulnerable to manipulation attacks. In order to provide a better context for performing classification, we monitor the incoming information flow and use the audit trail to construct controlled environments. The usefulness of this deployment scheme is demonstrated using a real collection of classified and unclassified documents. © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

• Engelstad, Paal E.; Hammer, Hugo Lewi; Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Yazidi, Anis; Nordbotten, Nils Agne & Bai, Aleksander (2016). Automatic security classification with Lasso. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. 9503, p. 399–410. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-31875-2_33. Full text in Research Archive
• Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Mancini, Federico & Engelstad, Paal E. (2016). Data loss prevention based on text classification in controlled environments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-49806-5_7. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Loss of sensitive data is a common problem with potentially severe consequences. By categorizing documents according to their sensitivity, security controls can be performed based on this classification. However, errors in the classification process may effectively result in information leakage. While automated classification techniques can be used to mitigate this risk, little work has been done to evaluate the effectiveness of such techniques when sensitive content has been transformed (e.g., a document can be summarized, rewritten, or have paragraphs copy-pasted into a new one). To better handle these more difficult data leaks, this paper proposes the use of controlled environments to detect misclassification. By monitoring the incoming information flow, the documents imported into a controlled environment can be used to better determine the sensitivity of the document(s) created within the same environment. Our evaluation results show that this approach, using techniques from machine learning and information retrieval, provides improved detection of incorrectly classified documents that have been subject to more complex data transformations.

• Haakseth, Raymond; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Kristiansen, Bengt & Jonsson, Øyvind (2015). A High Assurance Cross-Domain Guard for Use in Service-Oriented Architectures, Proceedings International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems ICMCIS (former MCC) : Cracow, Poland, 18th-19th May 2015. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). ISSN 9788393484850. doi: 10.1109/ICMCIS.2015.7158668. Full text in Research Archive
• Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Nordbotten, Nils Agne & Fauskanger, Stian (2015). Policy-Based Labelling: A Flexible Framework for Trusted Data Labelling, Proceedings International Conference on Military Communications and Information Systems ICMCIS (former MCC) : Cracow, Poland, 18th-19th May 2015. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). ISSN 9788393484850. doi: 10.1109/icmcis.2015.7158708. Full text in Research Archive
• Hammer, Hugo Lewi; Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Bai, Aleksander; Yazidi, Anis; Nordbotten, Nils Agne & Engelstad, Paal E. (2015). Automatic Security Classification by Machine Learning for Cross-Domain Information Exchange. MILCOM IEEE Military Communications Conference. ISSN 2155-7578. doi: 10.1109/MILCOM.2015.7357672. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Cross-domain information exchange is necessary to obtain information superiority in the military domain, and should be based on assigning appropriate security labels to the information objects. Most of the data found in a defense network is unlabeled, and usually new unlabeled information is produced every day. Humans find that doing the security labeling of such information is labor-intensive and time consuming. At the same time there is an information explosion observed where more and more unlabeled information is generated year by year. This calls for tools that can do advanced content inspection, and automatically determine the security label of an information object correspondingly. This paper presents a machine learning approach to this problem. To the best of our knowledge, machine learning has hardly been analyzed for this problem, and the analysis on topical classification presented here provides new knowledge and a basis for further work within this area. Presented results are promising and demonstrates that machine learning can become a useful tool to assist humans in determining the appropriate security label of an information object.

• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2010). Cross-Domain Access Control in a Military SOA. In Milcom?, Milcom (Eds.), Next Decade of Military Communications. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). ISSN 9781424481798. p. 1708–1715. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the advantage of facilitating integration and information exchange between different administrative domains (e.g., within a coalition). However, in order to support this in a secure manner, cross-domain access control is required. Various solutions to this have been developed with civilian Internet applications in mind. In this paper we consider the architectural approaches (i.e., communication patterns) used by these existing solutions and find that these approaches are not suitable for use in many military systems due to differing connectivity characteristics and availability requirements. A different approach is therefore proposed in order to better fulfill the availability requirements of military applications. Furthermore, we also consider how such access control solutions can be implemented bearing in mind the assurance requirements of military security mechanisms compared to those of typical civilian applications

• Lysne, Olav; Skeie, Tor; Reinemo, Svein Arne; Sem-Jacobsen, Frank Olav & Nordbotten, N.A. (2010). Scalable Interconnection Networks. In Tveito, Aslak; Bruaset, Are Magnus & Lysne, Olav (Ed.), Simula Research Laboratory - by thinking constantly about it. Springer. ISSN 9783642011559. p. 129–162. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2010). Cross-Domain Access Control in a Military SOA. MILCOM IEEE Military Communications Conference. ISSN 2155-7578. p. 448–455. Full text in Research Archive
• Lysne, Olav; Skeie, Tor; Reinemo, Sven-Arne; Sem-Jacobsen, Frank; Nordbotten, Nils & Tveito, Aslak [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2009). Scalable Interconnection Networks. In Tveito, Aslak; Bruaset, Are Magnus & Lysne, Olav (Ed.), Simula Research Laboratory - by thinking constantly about it. Springer. ISSN 9783642011559. p. 129–162. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A modern supercomputer or large scale server consists of a huge set of processing units and units that perform different forms of input/output and memory functions. These components unite in a complex collaboration to perform the main tasks of the system. Such collaboration requires communication between the components, which is supported by an infrastructure called the interconnection network. This book chapter describes the interconnection networks research activity at Simula the last five years done by the ICON group. ICON has focused on how to connect point-to-point links and switches into scalable network topologies, and how to route packets efficiently in order to yield the highest possible performance. This also poses various requirements regarding fault tolerance, quality of service (QoS), congestion control, virtualization, and other non-functional aspects. ICON's research results have been published in several of the most respected IEEE journals and magazines within our field. Furthermore, some of ICON's solutions have had a major impact on the routing architecture of modern supercomputers.

• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2009). XML and Web services security standards. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. doi: 10.1109/SURV.2009.090302. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  XML and Web services are widely used in current distributed systems. The security of the XML based communication, and the Web services themselves, is of great importance to the overall security of these systems. Furthermore, in order to facilitate interoperability, the security mechanisms should preferably be based on established standards. In this paper we provide a tutorial on current security standards for XML and Web services. The discussed standards include XML Signature, XML Encryption, the XML Key Management Specification (XKMS), WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, Web Services Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).

• Nordbotten, Nils & Skeie, Tor (2008). A Routing Methodology for Dynamic Fault Tolerance in Meshes and Tori. In Aluru, Srinivas; Parashar, Manish; Badrinath, Ramamurthy & Prasanna, Viktor K. (Ed.), High Performance Computing - HiPC 2007: 14th International Conference. Springer. ISSN 9783540772194. p. 514–527. Full text in Research Archive
• Gómez, Maria; Nordbotten, Nils; Skeie, Tor & Lysne, Olav (2006). A Routing Methodology for Achieving Fault Tolerance in Direct Networks. IEEE transactions on computers. ISSN 0018-9340. 55, p. 400–415. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Massively parallel computing systems are being built with thousands of nodes. The interconnection network plays a key role for the performance of such systems. However, the high number of components significantly increases the probability of failure. Additionally, failures in the interconnection network may isolate a large fraction of the machine. It is therefore critical to provide an efficient fault-tolerant mechanism to keep the system running, even in the presence of faults. This paper presents a new fault-tolerant routing methodology that does not degrade performance in the absence of faults and tolerates a reasonably large number of faults without disabling any healthy node. In order to avoid faults, for some source-destination pairs, packets are first sent to an intermediate node and then from this node to the destination node. Fully adaptive routing is used along both subpaths. The methodology assumes a static fault model and the use of a checkpoint/restart mechanism. However, there are scenarios where the faults cannot be avoided solely by using an intermediate node. Thus, we also provide some extensions to the methodology. Specifically, we propose disabling adaptive routing and/or using misrouting on a per-packet basis. We also propose the use of more than one intermediate node for some paths. The proposed fault-tolerant routing methodology is extensively evaluated in terms of fault tolerance, complexity, and performance.

• Gomez, M.; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Flich, J.; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Duato, J [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2006). A Routing Methodology for Achieving Fault-Tolerance in Direct Networks. IEEE transactions on computers. ISSN 0018-9340. Full text in Research Archive
• Gomez, Maria; Duato, Jose; Flich, Jose; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Nordbotten, Nils [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). An effcient fault-tolerant routing methodology for meshes and tori. IEEE computer architecture letters. ISSN 1556-6056. Full text in Research Archive
• Gomez, M.; Flich, J.; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio; Duato, J & Nordbotten, Nils Agne [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). An Effective Fault-Tolerant Routing Methodology for Direct Networks. In Eigenmann, Rudolf (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Parallel Processing. IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). ISSN 9780769521978. Full text in Research Archive
• Gomez, M.; Duato, J; Flich, J.; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Nordbotten, Nils Agne [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). A New Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Routing Methodology for Direct Networks. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Skeie, Tor & Aakvaag, Niels (2004). Methods for service discovery in Bluetooth scatternets. Computer Communications. ISSN 0140-3664. 27(11), p. 1087–1096. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Gomez, M.; Flich, J.; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Skeie, Tor [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). A Fully Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Routing Methodology Based on Intermediate Nodes. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). ISSN 0302-9743. Full text in Research Archive
• Gomez, M.; Duato, J; Flich, J.; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Nordbotten, Nils Agne [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Routing Methodology for Meshes and Tori. IEEE computer architecture letters. ISSN 1556-6056. Full text in Research Archive
• Aakvaag, Niels D. & Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2003). IPv6: the new Internet protocol - implications of the next-generation Internet protocol for ABB. ABB review. ISSN 1013-3119. p. 30–35. Full text in Research Archive

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• Chong, Peter Han Joo & Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2024). Series Editorial: Military Communications and Networks. IEEE Communications Magazine. ISSN 0163-6804. 62(1), p. 54–54. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2024.10401868. Full text in Research Archive
• Chong, Peter Han Joo & Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2023). Military Communications and Networks. IEEE Communications Magazine. ISSN 0163-6804. 61(5), p. 158–158. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2023.10129047. Full text in Research Archive
• Chan, Kevin; Chong, Peter Han Joo & Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2022). Series Editorial: Military Communications and Networks. IEEE Communications Magazine. ISSN 0163-6804. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2020). Sårbarheter i IKT-systemer. In Bergsjø, Håkon; Windvik, Ronny & Øverlier, Lasse (Ed.), Digital sikkerhet - En innføring. Universitetsforlaget. ISSN 9788215034225. p. 129–143. Full text in Research Archive
• Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Mancini, Federico & Engelstad, Paal E. (2017). An Internal/Insider Threat Score for Data Loss Prevention and Detection. Full text in Research Archive
• Kongsgård, Kyrre Wahl; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Engelstad, Paal E. & Mancini, Federico (2017). Data Loss Prevention for Cross-Domain Instant Messaging. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper proposes a cascading classifier for inspecting and validating the payload of chat messages in (military) instant messaging. The first step in the cascading classifier pipeline is an anomaly detection-based method whose purpose is to ensure that the message channel is not used to exfiltrate non-message data such as images, documents, binary files or encrypted content. Messages that pass the filtering phase then proceed to have their content analyzed for the presence of known sensitive information. This data loss prevention step is enhanced by incorporating an author profile signal that assesses the validity of the claimed authorship by capturing the stylometric signature embedded in each user's past message stream. The hypothesis being that the inference and subsequent inclusion of latent author traits such as gender, age and ethnicity will aid the data loss prevention solution by reducing the number of incorrect classifications. Experiments were conducted using message traffic that was generated during a field-training exercise conducted by members of the armed forces, as well as an internal repository of classified documents and a myriad of non-message based data sources. The results demonstrated that our proposed traffic-filtering classifier is successful in distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. Further, the experiments showed that constructing authorship verification models, using sparse messages as a training set, is feasible and that including this signal in the data loss prevention solution leads to a significant increase in the predictive performance for the cross-domain messaging setting.

• Melrose, John; Wrona, Konrad; Guenther, Thomas; Haakseth, Raymond; Nordbotten, Nils Agne & Westerdahl, Lars (2016). Labelling for integrity and availability. Full text in Research Archive
• Haakseth, Raymond; Nordbotten, Nils Agne; Kristiansen, Bengt & Jonsson, Øyvind (2015). A High Assurance Cross-Domain Guard for Use in Service-Oriented Architectures. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2010). Cross-Domain Access Control in a Military SOA. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Service-oriented architectures (SOA) provide the advantage of facilitating integration and information exchange between different administrative domains (e.g., within a coalition). However, in order to support this in a secure manner, cross-domain access control is required. Various solutions to this have been developed with civilian Internet applications in mind. In this paper we consider the architectural approaches (i.e., communication patterns) used by these existing solutions and find that these approaches are not suitable for use in many military systems due to differing connectivity characteristics and availability requirements. A different approach is therefore proposed in order to better fulfill the availability requirements of military applications. Furthermore, we also consider how such access control solutions can be implemented bearing in mind the assurance requirements of military security mechanisms compared to those of typical civilian applications.

• Nordbotten, Nils; Skeie, Tor & Aluru, Srinivas (2007). A Routing Methodology for Dynamic Fault Tolerance in Meshes and Tori. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper proposes a fully distributed fault-tolerant routing methodology for tori and meshes. A dynamic fault-model is supported, enabling the network to remain fully operational at all times. Contrary to most previous proposals that support a dynamic fault-model, the methodology is able to tolerate concave fault regions, thereby avoiding disabling healthy nodes in most practical scenarios. The methodology provides high network performance through the use of adaptive routing and provides graceful performance degradation in the presence of faults.

• Gomez, Maria; Duato, Jose; Flich, Jose; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Nordbotten, Nils [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). A new adaptive fault-tolerant routing methodology for direct networks. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils; Gomez, Maria; Flich, Jose; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio & Skeie, Tor [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). A fully adaptive fault-tolerant routing methodology based on intermediate nodes. Full text in Research Archive
• Gomez, Maria; Flich, Jose; Lopez, Pedro; Robles, Antonio; Duato, Jose & Nordbotten, Nils [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2004). An effective fault-tolerant routing methodology for direct networks. Full text in Research Archive
• Nordbotten, Nils Agne (2008). Fault-Tolerant Routing in Interconnection Networks. Universitetet i Oslo. Full text in Research Archive

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