Proyectos archivo | Programa FRIDA

Computer Waste Management Plant of Node TAU / Right to a healthy environment, social and labor inclusion and digital inclusion

The Computer Waste Management Plant is a social enterprise promoted by Nodo Tau aimed at the environmentally correct management of technological waste, recovering materials for production, avoiding the extraction of natural environments and their contamination and promoting the creation of youth employment and the reuse of equipment for a second useful life, especially in community spaces.

The Computer Waste Management Plant is today an experience that grows in work, in training and in articulations with numerous institutions. The Plant today receives equipment from government entities and some companies, and from collection campaigns. Equipment that can be repaired begins a second useful life. Those that do not, are disassembled and their materials are recovered, saving the environmental impact that they would have if they were improperly disposed of or accumulated.

In 4 years of work at the Plant, its objectives have been to give waste proper environmental treatment, consolidate a work space for young people and recover equipment for social projects. Regarding specific indicators of this work, the project has some indicators that show what has been achieved, including more than 100 tons of WEEE treated, 700 computers recovered for a second useful life, 35 community spaces that received computers recovered in the plant and a work team made up of 8 young people who are going through their first work experience within the framework of the Santa Fe Más program and consolidating a productive unit, which is the only one in the city enabled to address this problem.

Yafun Project

Based on a proposal presented that allows progress towards total digital connectivity of the Chilean territory, the project sought to understand the problem of resilience (tolerance to faults, attacks and catastrophes) of the Internet in general and apply this knowledge. The objective was to make an innovative proposal to improve the country’s connectivity in terms of access, quality and resilience. Based on graph theory and optimization, and a cost-benefit analysis, the necessary routes and lines of trunk fiber optics were presented to ensure connectivity and resilience of all regions of the country.

The regulatory authority was able to offer subsidies to the supply for the development and deployment of this fiber optic infrastructure, allowing rural and extreme sectors to have the same technical feasibility as the metropolis.

This work has configured a map of national digital connectivity, which identifies the existing deployment of structuring fiber optics on main and secondary roads, along with details of 1,800 locations without Internet access.

Thanks to field research, carried out in 345 communes of the country, the research team has been able to collaborate with initiatives and connectivity projects of community and regional scope, developing actions required to shorten the national digital divide.

Citizen Laboratory for Gender Equity in ICT

This project proposes a set of activities designed from a gender perspective so that women and girls achieve an effective insertion into the digital world, based on a breakdown of gender digital gap indicators for rural areas with basic and advanced digital skills. In parallel, gender-based violence that is reproduced in the digital context such as cyberbullying, groming, revenge among others, which make the digital world an unsafe context for them, will be addressed, so that good practices are addressed from prevention and education, for a safe and equitable Internet, the development of inclusive IT solutions designed by women for the well-being of all citizens.

Promoting citizen digital innovation from a gender perspective, the Union of Informaticians of Cuba, based on a methodological proposal that allows promoting citizen digital innovation from a gender perspective, will work to educate the female universe at the local level, regarding the assimilation of basic and advanced digital skills; vocationally guiding adolescents and young people to study STEM specialties, digitally empowering women, adolescents and girls and will work on the development of professional skills of women and adolescents in pursuit of their incorporation into the labor market.

Assistance to Mayan leaders of the Digital Community Centers

New Sun Road Guatemala, S.A. has worked on the creation of twenty Digital Community Centers (CCDs) with solar energy and internet connectivity in rural communities with indigenous populations in Guatemala, more than two thousand women were trained in digital skills, video tutorials were generated in Q’eqchi and Chuj languages, more than two hundred women were trained to form the Women Leaders Committee and more than fourteen thousand services have been provided to the communities through the CCDs. To continue advancing in this objective, currently, the organization, through this initiative, seeks to provide support and technical assistance to the leaders of the twenty existing Centers in Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz, strengthening digital skills with video tutorials and remote support in Q’eqchi’y Chuj , focused on existing artificial intelligence (AI) tools that help reduce language barriers for full use of the internet to support its users to improve their digital skills.

In addition to helping the conservation of these Mayan languages by digitizing them, the Committee of leaders will be supported to integrate a Commission of Digital Community Centers integrating the Cocodes, religious leaders, teachers, among other relevant actors to integrate workshops with playful activities that allow breaking gender stereotypes, raise awareness regarding positive masculinities in the community and mainly include the relatives of the leaders so that they can help with shared tasks at home and support them in their full use of the internet.

Creating capacities for women and girls in the Chitara Cerritana: We are Guardians of the Páramo

This project seeks the implementation of wireless and sustainable communication technologies in the local communities of the Almorzadero páramo, including community radios, satellite communication systems and long-distance communication networks based on WIFi, seeking to improve connectivity and communication between the páramo communities, which will help promote social, economic and cultural development in these isolated areas of peasant tradition. In addition, these communication networks will be used to facilitate the coordination and exchange of information on the conservation and management of natural resources in the páramo, which will contribute to the protection and conservation of these valuable ecosystems.

Thus, the project focuses on promoting the use, management and community participation of peasant women in a wireless Community Network to guarantee communication in their territory as well as Internet access, giving workshops for self-management of the network and benefiting the more than 250 associated women who for nearly 17 years have been forging and strengthening their peasant and community organization. In this way, Colnodo and the members of the community themselves will be able to contribute to such an important undertaking, holding workshops to identify their needs with them and propose solutions that can be provided jointly with the community, strengthening local productive capacities and raising awareness about the risks related to the Internet and information and communication technologies, especially those that affect women and girls. Through a participatory approach that involves community members in all stages of the project, from planning to implementation and maintenance, activities such as training workshops, infrastructure installation, and network performance monitoring will be carried out

Through a participatory approach where community members will be involved in all stages of the project, from planning to implementation and maintenance, activities such as training workshops, infrastructure installation and monitoring of network performance will be carried out.

Open-source Virtual Broadband Network Gateway (vBNG) as a Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) app for ISPs

Traditional BNG deployments often rely on proprietary and hardware-dependent solutions, leading to vendor lock-in, limited scalability, and challenges in adapting to evolving network requirements. The project addresses these issues by leveraging SONIC NOS and its open-source nature to develop a virtual BNG solution that is hardware-agnostic, scalable, and flexible.

The primary objective is to create a virtual BNG solution that decouples the software from hardware specifics, allowing it to run on various hardware platforms and switch ASICs supported by SONIC NOS. This hardware independence promotes vendor choice, scalability, and the ability to leverage new hardware innovations without disruption. Then design and develop a vBNG architecture that can scale seamlessly based on network demands. By leveraging the capabilities of SONIC NOS and its integration with the SAI interface, the vBNG solution can efficiently handle a large number of subscribers, adapt to changing network conditions, and support dynamic service provisioning.

integrate the vBNG software seamlessly with SONIC NOS, utilizing the SAI interface to interact with switch ASICs. This integration enables the vBNG to control and manage the underlying hardware components, including packet forwarding, QoS policies, and other hardware-specific operations.

The project seeks to implement robust subscriber management functionalities, including authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), as well as service provisioning and policy enforcement. The vBNG solution will support various authentication methods, handle subscriber sessions, enforce policies, and provide network services to connected subscribers.

Performance Optimization and Efficiency: The objective is to optimize the performance and efficiency of the vBNG solution by leveraging hardware acceleration, intelligent traffic management, and QoS mechanisms. By efficiently utilizing the capabilities of switch ASICs and the SAI interface, the vBNG can deliver high throughput, low latency, and effective resource utilization.

The project promotes collaboration and community engagement within the SONIC ecosystem. It aims to contribute back to the SONIC open-source community by sharing enhancements, best practices, and experiences gained during the development of the vBNG solution. This collaboration fosters innovation, knowledge exchange, and community-driven improvements.

Data Quality Assessment for Machine Learning in Network Security

The project addresses a pressing issue on network security research and development, which is the lack of explainability in innovative ML-based solutions applied to identifying, preventing, and responding to attacks in the Internet infrastructure, especially considering the rise of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and zero-day malwares. While this issue is not unique to Latin America, the technical knowledge of the researchers in the region are uniquely suited to tackle this pressing matter.

The objectives for this project are to define a specific data quality metric for each of the following quality aspects of data: accuracy, timeliness, uniqueness, validity, consistency and completeness. Given the established metrics for data quality in networking, the project will develop a collaborative online platform to evaluate and rank publicly available dataset commonly used datasets for ML in networking. This platform is expected to serve as a guide for researchers to choose which dataset best suits the needs of the research they are developing. In addition, this rank will serve as a reference point for the development of new datasets in the future.

The expected results are a classification and categorization of the current approaches to measure the quality of data in ML in general, and for networking and network security in particular, providing recommendations to developers and researchers regarding increasing the quality of datasets used in networking, based on the observations produced through the data quality metrics. These recommendations will be based on classification and the evaluations performed so that they are supported by scientific evidence. The results of the project will be an open-source Python package that allows any developer or researcher to use the developed data quality metrics in any particular traffic capture; an open-source collaborative platform for ranking network-related datasets, and an open-source software to allow and facilitate the evaluation of private datasets locally.

Measuring the DNS in Latin America and the Caribbean: towards the development of regional indicators

LACTLD, together with the DNS Research Federation (DNSRF), proposes to develop a system of indicators to measure the evolution of the DNS ecosystem in Latin America and the Caribbean with a focus on ccTLDs. The project will seek to build a data matrix with the main variables for DNS analysis in the region, including data contributions from the ccTLD community in the region.

The objective of this measurement project is to advance the understanding of the DNS ecosystem, study achievements and development opportunities for the ccTLD community, and document its contribution to the digitization processes in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The data will be processed and analyzed through the DNSRF data analysis platform, and used to generate a set of indicators that allows the identification of trends and development opportunities in the DNS ecosystem. The indicators will be presented through an online platform that will be updated live, allowing continuous visualization and measurement over time. Indicators to be analyzed will include statistics on market players (registries, ICANN-accredited and non-ICANN-accredited registrars, resellers, hosting companies and other relevant service providers); statistics on domain registration and its evolution; domain usage trends (considering parked domains); and indicators of levels of abuse, among others to be determined between LACTLD and the DNSRF.

The launch of the indicators will be accompanied by the production of a diagnostic report that analyzes trends observed at the time of publication. The regional scope study will aim to address the main trends in the regional DNS ecosystem, the main indicators that explain these trends, and the challenges and opportunities for DNS development in the region.

Colombian Blockchain Network: Development of Skills from a Laboratory for Social Applications and the Appropriation of Blockchain Technology in Colombia

With the mission of promoting scientific and academic initiatives of national interest, thus contributing to strengthening the Colombian ecosystem of research, science and education on Blockchain, this innovative initiative seeks to build an active community for the development of skills and an innovative laboratory for social applications. in Blockchain.

Create a link between advanced and developing technology centers by combining computing resources and infrastructures distributed throughout Colombia.

The Colombian Blockchain Network (RedCBC) seeks to face regional challenges in cybersecurity, access to advanced technology and knowledge generation. Developed in four phases, initially, a blockchain network is linked to RENATA to establish a secure and robust infrastructure for information verification. In the second phase, 300 people are trained in blockchain, promoting knowledge and projects with a social impact. Subsequently, an application for blockchain technology focused on areas such as cybersecurity and network operation is identified.

Title: Design and Implementation of a framework for the mitigation of DDoS attacks in the data plane of software-defined networks through AI and P4

The identification and mitigation of DDos cyberattacks using technologies such as SDN and artificial intelligence has been studied in recent years, obtaining satisfactory and promising results by training machine learning or deep learning models that act as an IDS that is deployed on the controller. This research group has been working on it in recent years, creating a framework for security automation in an SDN network that allows the identification and mitigation of DDoS attacks. However, one of the big challenges that all AI-based IDS face is scalability, due to the overload experienced by the controller, when analyzing a large number of flows. The proposed solution for scalability in SDN attack detection is to avoid the controller having to capture the data streams, extract the features to send to the IDS, instead the switches will extract the features from the data streams directly using P4 and will send them directly to the IDS for validation, avoiding driver overload.

The objective of this research is to improve the scalability of the current framework, by mitigating DDoS attacks in the data plane through the use of IA and P4, in this way scalability could be improved for complex architectures with a high volume of traffic.

The use of software-defined networks is currently global, since they are present in the administration of large networks as well as in the creation of dynamic WANs with SD-WAN solutions, with which the benefit and impact of the research results they will be very large since their coverage is not only in our Latin American region but throughout the world, coupled with this the increase in cyberattacks globally makes a solution that helps reduce the number of DDoS attacks not only very useful but highly desirable because of the great impact it will have.