Xinyu Ma

Xinyu Ma

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science

Sitemap

A list of all the posts and pages found on the site. For you robots out there is an XML version available for digesting as well.

Pages

Posts

Local and Global in Math

9 minute read

Published:

Local vs Global seems to be one of the most important philosophies behind math. People in some fields call it “compactness”, others don’t. In short, it says that the property of an object is related to the property of every smaller subobject.

Rational Points of Elliptic Curves

5 minute read

Published:

This post briefly proves why the rational points of an elliptic curve is a group. The proof idea comes from MATH 214B, but I tried to use classical language.

Some Notes on Playing C++ Coroutine

9 minute read

Published:

This posts briefly introduced what I learned on C++ 20 coroutine mechanism after I used it to imitate Python generator and ayncio. REPO

Two’s complement and 2-adic number

7 minute read

Published:

This posts discusses the relation between two’s complement and 2-adic integer in math. I want to show what operations we can have if we ignore overflow.

CS 219: Network Verification - Course Review

16 minute read

Published:

George is a fantastic teacher with very attractive lectures. I think his secret sauces include the following:

  • Look at everything from different views: Zoe (ζωή, big picture) versus Bios (βίος, details).
  • Selectively focus on the most important techniques and examples, ignoring unnecessary points. Students can feel that they learned a lot without remembering too much boring concepts.
  • Have his own methodologies on creative process. Students can experience those “Aha” times when following his introduction.

Authentication and Authorization

8 minute read

Published:

Authentication (AuthN, 認証) and authorization (AuthZ, 承認) are important pieces in system security. In one word, AuthN verifies the identity of the requester, and AuthZ decides whether a specific operation is allowed.

Polynomial Algorithms

10 minute read

Published:

This post introduces some tricks on polynomials widely used in ICPC. I will try to practice algebraic knowledge as well.

Chess Picking Problem

3 minute read

Published:

Rephrase the chess picking problem in a more formal way.

Algebra Miscs

15 minute read

Published:

Misc things that are taught in class but not written in the note of MATH 210.

Residue Theorem and its Application

8 minute read

Published:

This post makes notes on residue theorem and its application, since most non-mathematicians only need to remember this after learning complex analysis. Some definitions may be not defined very rigorously from a complex analysis view.

LIS and network flow

19 minute read

Published:

This post discusses Longest Increasing Subsequence (LIS) and network flow problem.

Stability of DLedger

5 minute read

Published:

In this post I want to analyze the stability of Dledger, a DAG-based distributed logging system.

Service Invocation: A Brief Survey

30 minute read

Published:

Service invocation is tricky. The protocol itself seems to be super simple: we call a function, and it returns. But the problem is, when the function is on another machine, how we know the state of that machine / the whole system. The developers of the caller do not want to care, so we protocol designers should care for them. But trying to make everyone happy is so tough here.

Service Discovery: A Survey

19 minute read

Published:

There is always a need for service discovery and load balancing, but no universal solution. Sometimes naive ways may satisfy most needs.

Confusing Terms

6 minute read

Published:

I find that some terms are confusing.

NDN API 1: Encoding

21 minute read

Published:

TL; DR: Reflection should be used for encoding or serilization.

The sqrt thesis of mixing strategies

23 minute read

Published:

When solving a problem, it is common that we have two different strategies that fit in different cases. For example, one algorithm may have a better time complexity but uses more memory than the other. Or, one is fast when there are only a few of large objects, but the other works better when there are many small objects. However, I found that there usually exists a solution which is a naive mixture of the two strategies, and its performance will be the sqrt of the two.

projects

Vehicle Instrument Recognition

Date: 2016

Code
This is a course project that reads the number indicated by a vehicle instrument. We use Kirsch and Sobel operators to sharpen the image, Otsu algorithm for thresholding, and RANSEC to detect the scale marks and the hand. We calculate the result based on the angle.

Best Threshold in Ball Recognition

Date: 2016

Code
Threshold is widely used in RoboCup Middle Size League (MSL) for ball recognization. We proposed an algorithm to find the best threshold without manually tuning arguments. This is submitted to Science Challenge in RoboCup China Open 2016.

RISC-V Vector Extension in Gem5

Date: 2018

Code Report
This is a course project for CS 251B. We modified gem5 simulator to support a subset of RISC-V vector extensions draft in system-call emulation mode. We also wrote some testing assembly & C code which can be run on a bare metal machine for evaluation.

NFD Configuration Manager

Date: 2019

Code
NFD Configuration Manager (NDN-FM) provides a graphical interface to increase the ease with which users can manage local instances of the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD) and other packet forwarders implementing the NFD Management Protocol: NDN-FM can monitor the status of the forwarder; create, update, and delete faces and routes; manage certificates; and run basic NDN debugging tools.

External Workload Support in Kubernetes

Date: 2020

Pull Request User Guide KEP(TBA)
Kubernetes has a well-rounded ecosystem for pods in the cluster. But it does not provide a standard interface for pods to interact with external workloads, such as VMs. This project proposed ExternalWorkload custom resource to represent workloads, provides pod to workload load balancing, and supports mixed backends for Services based on EndpointSlices. I have implemented a PoC demo, which is merged into GCE Ingress Controller. The KEP is being reviewed.

publications

Evolving intelligent devices for the future via named data networking

Published in XRDS 26, 2019

As the numbers and capabilities of networked devices continue to grow, they will play an increasingly important role in daily life. Ensuring security and usability will be the first and foremost challenge; Named Data Networking can help address this challenge through localized trust, usable security, and autoconfiguration.

Recommended citation: Zhiyi Zhang, Edward Lu, Yu Guan, Tianxiang Li, Xinyu Ma, Zhaoning Kong, and Lixia Zhang. 2019. Evolving intelligent devices for the future via named data networking. XRDS 26, 1 (Fall 2019), 36–39. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3351482 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351482

GitSync: distributed version control system on NDN

Published in ICN 21, 2021

Git is designed as a distributed version control system which has been widely used. However, most of the existing projects use a workflow where developers have to synchronize with a central server. This poster explores the possibility of a truly distributed git platform, dubbed GitSync, by making git run over Named-data Networking (NDN). GitSync runs a peer-to-peer protocol to get rid of central servers, therefore enabling higher availability when not all users are connected to cloud all the time. Therefore GitSync eliminates single point of failure and can continue operation over unstable connectivity and network partition.

Recommended citation: Xinyu Ma and Lixia Zhang. 2021. GitSync: distributed version control system on NDN. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 121–123. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460417.3483372

YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon

Published in ICN 21, 2021

We have developed YaNFD as a new software packet forwarder for NDN. YaNFD achieves compatibility with existing NDN applications and forwarders, as well as high throughput. YaNFD features multi-threaded forwarding, a smaller and more streamlined codebase compared to existing implementations, and can be managed using existing NDN forwarder management utilities and protocols. In this paper, we discuss our implementation, including how it differs from previous forwarders based upon lessons learned during their development and use over the span of multiple years. Additionally, we present the lessons learned from our experience developing a new forwarder for NDN from the ground up.

Recommended citation: Eric Newberry, Xinyu Ma, and Lixia Zhang. 2021. YaNFD: Yet another named data networking forwarding daemon. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460417.3482969

Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security

Published in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of smart homes; most of them are controlled by remote servers in the cloud. Such designs raise security and privacy concerns for end users. In this article, we describe the design of Sovereign, a home Internet of Things (IoT) system framework that provides end users complete control of their home IoT systems. Sovereign lets home IoT devices and applications communicate via application-named data and secures data directly. This approach enables direct, secure, one-to-one, and one-to-many Device-to-Device communication over wireless broadcast media. Sovereign utilizes semantic names to construct usable security solutions. We implement Sovereign as a publish–subscribe-based development platform together with a prototype home IoT controller. Our preliminary evaluation shows that Sovereign provides a systematic, easy-to-use solution to user-controlled, self-contained smart homes running on existing IoT hardware without imposing noticeable overhead.

Recommended citation: Z. Zhang, T. Yu, X. Ma, Y. Guan, P. Moll and L. Zhang, "Sovereign: Self-Contained Smart Home With Data-Centric Network and Security," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 9, no. 15, pp. 13808-13822, 1 Aug.1, 2022, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2022.3144980

CertRevoke: a certificate revocation framework for named data networking

Published in ICN 22, 2022

Named Data Networking (NDN) secures network communications by requiring all data packets to be signed upon production. This requirement makes usable and efficient NDN certificate issuance and revocation essential for NDN operations. In this paper, we first investigate and clarify core concepts related to NDN certificate revocation, then proceed with the design of CertRevoke, an NDN certificate revocation framework. CertRevoke utilizes naming conventions and trust schema to ensure certificate owners and issuers legitimately produce in-network cacheable records for revoked certificates. We evaluate the security properties and performance of CertRevoke through case studies. Our results show that deploying CertRevoke in an operational NDN network is feasible.

Recommended citation: Tianyuan Yu, Hongcheng Xie, Siqi Liu, Xinyu Ma, Xiaohua Jia, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. CertRevoke: a certificate revocation framework for named data networking. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3558079

A type-theoretic model on NDN-TLV encoding

Published in ICN 22, 2022

In Named-Data Networking (NDN), all packets are encoded in the Type-Length-Value (TLV) format. TLV encoding and decoding are implemented in every NDN library, and used by all applications and forwarders. Therefore, formal analysis of TLV encoding can assist NDN software development in the simplification of the code base, analysis of the performance, and improvement of robustness.

Recommended citation: Xinyu Ma, Alexander Afanasyev, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. A type-theoretic model on NDN-TLV encoding. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3558093

Intertrust: establishing inter-zone trust relationships

Published in ICN 22, 2022

An NDN network is made of named entities with various trust relations between each other. Entities are organized into trust zones. Each trust zone contains the entities under the same administrative control. This work-in-progress explores an approach to establishing trust relations between trust zones.

Recommended citation: Tianyuan Yu, Xinyu Ma, Hongcheng Xie, Yekta Kocaoğullar, and Lixia Zhang. 2022. Intertrust: establishing inter-zone trust relationships. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 180–182. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517212.3559489

talks

teaching