Q: NASK encompasses a science sector…
A: Yes, it does because we are a research and development unit supervised by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education. We have been classified for the highest possible science category”1”. We are conducting research in collaboration with the Warsaw University of Technology, and in particular with its Electronics and Information Technology Faculty.
We are concerned with developing new techniques, among others those associated with the Internet economy. We aim at presenting clients with technical and economic offers so that we could sign contracts for the delivery of communications of defined-quality at a set time.
Our second line of research is concerned with telecommunications network security.
Q: You mean protection against hackers?
A: Hackers belong to the past. The thing that has now become dangerous is phishing (tricking web users into divulging sensitive information, such as bank and credit card accounts), sending out unwanted correspondence (spam), infecting computers with malicious software or blocking internet services. Some hard-to-detect computer crimes are detected by monitoring the network traffic. If the network operates definitely differently than normally, it can be asserted with near certainty that it has come under attack.
The qualified incident-response-service package which we have used includes the early warning Arakis system (designed and developed by us) which aggregates and correlates data from various sources. It ideally supplements other attack identification systems in that its much broader functionality allows for detecting and classifying new threats arising in Poland and in the world. In collaboration with the Internal Security Agency, the Arakis early warning detection systems have already been installed in several dozen Polish government networks.
We are involved in efforts at finding effective spam prevention methods. This is by no means an easy task since spam is not sent out from central servers but from botnets (software robots), which run autonomously and automatically on groups of zombie computers launching attach when activated by remote command & control servers.
Moreover, our organisation is also participating actively in the work of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) set up in 2005 to address, respond and prevent network and information security problems in EU countries.
We are conducting research on biometric identity verification methods capable of distinguishing within seconds a dummy from a live organism and on ensuring security of such an operation.
Q: As far as I know, NASK is also involved in commercial activities, such as for example registering and maintaining Internet domains...
A: We are operating on an open market. Some 160-180 million domain names have been registered all over the world. At the turn of April and May, our register of domains (which we file through 90 register partnership companies) exceeded one million. Poland is in the lead in Europe in terms of registered Internet domains: we have them more than Austria, Sweden or Spain, but definitely less than Germany and Great Britain (12 million and 7 million respectively) and less than those entered in the eu. register (2.5 million domains).
Services offered by NASK also include high level implementation and maintenance of IT systems although, of course, we do not compete as a ”software house” with big market players.
Our commercial activities also cover the establishment of a national radio broadband network of 18 transmitters (base stations) using four radio frequencies (3.5-38 GHz) covering 10% of Poland’s territory inhabited by 27% of its population. The NASK-WAN (Wide Area Network) assures a data transmission speed of up to 1 Gbps (which eliminates any internal limitations) and is connected to global networks by two international links with a total throughput capacity of 777 Mbps.
In 2007, NASK completed the “e-Świętokrzyskie – a radio net construction” project co-financed by the EU. The radio Internet access and radio data transmission technology which we applied outdo the later-developed technology now known as WiMAX. So far, the Świętokrzyskie project is the sole such wireless communications network in Poland to provide Internet access in a poorly developed and relatively scarcely inhabited area. The six point–multi point radio access base stations there cover about 75% of the inhabitants in the region.
Our expertise in this respect is most valuable considering that wireless networks are to be used for providing Internet access in underdeveloped parts of Eastern Poland.