De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Firewall Traversal in Mobile IPv6 Networks

Middleboxes, wie zum Beispiel Firewalls, sind ein wichtiger Aspekt für eine Großzahl moderner IP-Netzwerke. Heute IP-Netzwerke basieren überwiegend auf IPv4 Technologien, daher sind viele Firewalls und Network Address Translators (NATs) ursprünglich für diese Netzwerke entwickelt worden. Die Entwicklung von IPv6 Netzwerken findet zur Zeit statt. Da Mobile IPv6 ein relativ neuer Standard ist, unterstützen die meisten Firewalls die für IPv6 Netzwerke verfügbar sind, noch kein Mobile IPv6. Sofern Firewalls sich nicht der Details des Mobile IPv6 Protokolls bewusst sind, werden sie entweder Mobile IPv6 Kommunikation blockieren oder diesen sorgfältig handhaben. Dieses stellt einen der Haupthinderunggründe zum erfolgreichen Einsatz von Mobile IPv6 da.Diese Arbeit beschreibt die Probleme und Auswirkungen des Vorhandenseins von Middleboxes in Mobile IPv6 Umgebungen. Dazu wird zuerst erklärt welche Arten von Middleboxes es gibt, was genau eine Middlebox ist und wie eine solche Middlebox arbeiten und zweitens die Probleme identifiziert und die Auswirkungen des Vorhandenseins von Firewalls in Mobile IPv6 Umgebungen erklärt. Anschließend werden einige State-of-the-Art Middlebox Traversal Ansätze untersucht, die als mögliche Lösungen um die Mobile IPv6 Firewall Traversal Probleme zu bewältigen betrachtet werden können. Es wird detailiert erklärt wie diese Lösungen arbeiten und ihre Anwendbarkeit für Mobile IPv6 Firewall Traversal evaluiert.Als Hauptbeitrag bringt diese Arbeit zwei detailierte Lösungsansätze ein, welche das Mobile IPv6 Firewall Traversal Problem bewältigen können. Der erste Lösungsansatz, der NSIS basierte Mobile IPv6 Firewall Traversal, basiert auf dem Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) Rahmenwerk und dem NAT/Firewall NSIS Signaling Layer Protocol (NAT/FW NSLP). Anschließend wird der zweite Lösungsansatz vorgestellt, der Mobile IPv6 Application Layer Gateway. Diese Arbeit erklärt detailiert, wie diese Lösungsansätze die Probleme und Auswirkungen des Vorhandenseins von Middleboxes in Mobile IPv6 Umgebungen bewältigen. Desweitern stellt diese Arbeit vor, wie die NSIS basierte Mobile IPv6 Firewall Traversal und die Mobile IPv6 Application Layer Gateway Proof-of-Concept Implementierungen, die im Rahmen dieser Arbeit entwicklet wurden, implementiert wurden. Abschließend werden die Proof-of-Concept Implementierungen sowie die beiden Lösungsansätze allgemein evaluiert und analysiert

LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed

Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level middleboxes deployed at real networks. We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First, we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve 10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201

Options for Securing RTP Sessions

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is used in a large number of different application domains and environments. This heterogeneity implies that different security mechanisms are needed to provide services such as confidentiality, integrity, and source authentication of RTP and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) packets suitable for the various environments. The range of solutions makes it difficult for RTP-based application developers to pick the most suitable mechanism. This document provides an overview of a number of security solutions for RTP and gives guidance for developers on how to choose the appropriate security mechanism

Enhancing Automated Network Management

Network management benefits from automated tools. With the recent advent of software-defined principles, automated tools have been proposed from both industry and academia to fulfill function components in the network management control loop. While automation aims to accommodate the ever increasing network diversity and dynamics with improved reliability and management efficiency, it also brings new concerns as it’s becoming more difficult to understand the control of the network and operators cannot rely on traditional troubleshooting tools. Meanwhile, how to effectively integrate new automation tools with existing legacy networks remains a question. This dissertationpresents efficient methods to address key functionalities within the control loop in the adaption of automated network management.Identifying the network-wide forwarding behaviors of a packet is essential for many network management tasks, including policy enforcement, rule verification, and fault localization. We start by presenting AP Classifier. AP Classifier was developed based on the concept of atomic predicates which can be used to characterize the forwarding behaviors of packets. There is an increasing trend that enterprises outsource their Network Function (NF) processing to a cloud to lower cost and ease management. To avoid threats to the enterprise’s private information, we propose SICS based on AP Classifier, a secure and dynamic NF outsourcing framework. Stateful NFs have become essential parts of modern networks, increasing the complexity in network management. A major step in network automation is to automatically translate high level network intents into low level configurations. To ensure those configurations and the states generated by automation match intents, we present Epinoia, a network intent checker for stateful networks. While the concept of auto-translation sounds promising, operators may not know what intents should be. To close the control loop, we present AutoInfer to automatically infer intents of running networks, which helps operators understand the network runtime states

SOFTWARE DEFINED CUSTOMIZATION OF NETWORK PROTOCOLS WITH LAYER 4.5

The rise of software defined networks, programmable data planes, and host level kernel programmability gives rise to highly specialized enterprise networks. One form of network specialization is protocol customization, which traditionally extends existing protocols with additional features, primarily for security and performance reasons. However, the current methodologies to deploy protocol customizations lack the agility to support rapidly changing customization needs. This dissertation designs and evaluates the first software-defined customization architecture capable of distributing and continuously managing protocol customizations within enterprise or datacenter networks. Our unifying architecture is capable of performing per-process customizations, embedding per-network security controls, and aiding the traversal of customized application flows through otherwise problematic middlebox devices. Through the design and evaluation of the customization architecture, we further our understanding of, and provide robust support for, application transparent protocol customizations. We conclude with the first ever demonstration of active application flow "hot-swapping" of protocol customizations, a capability not currently supported in operational networks.Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA 22203Lieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Simplified Network Signaling Architecture

The wheel has been reinvented several times in signaling protocols. Most signaling protocols re-invent, e.g., their own signaling transport methods, end-point discovery, measures for reliable exchange of messages and security features. Next Steps In Signaling (NSIS) framework was created in the IETF to design a single unified framework for various network signaling needs. The signaling transport layer of NSIS, the General Internet Signaling Transport (GIST), was specified in the IETF to provide a common transport service for signaling applications. The NSIS suite also includes two signaling protocols, NSIS Signaling Layer Protocols (NSLP), one for Quality of Service provisioning and one to configure middleboxes, in particular Network Address Translators and firewalls. The different signaling applications use GIST message delivery services through an API that consists of several operations. On top of common operations for sending and receiving data, the API also covers network events, errors and session state management. The API covers all GIST aspects, and allows application developers to have adequate knowledge of network state. However, as a result the API is very cumbersome to use, and an application developer needs to take care of non-trivial amount of details. A further challenge is that to create a new signaling application, one needs to acquire and register a unique NSLP identifier with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). This thesis presents the Messaging NSLP, that provides an abstraction layer to hide complex GIST features from the signaling application. Developers of Messaging Applications can use a simple Messaging API to open and close sessions and to transfer application data from one Messaging Application node to another. Prototype implementations of NSLP API and Messaging NSLP were created and tested to verify the protocol operation with various network scenarios. Overhead analysis of GIST and Messaging NSLP were performed, and results are compatible with earlier, third-party analysis. The Messaging NSLP can introduce up to 938 bytes of overhead to initiate a signaling session, but later signaling only introduces 78 bytes of header overhead

Heterogeneous Access: Survey and Design Considerations

As voice, multimedia, and data services are converging to IP, there is a need for a new networking architecture to support future innovations and applications. Users are consuming Internet services from multiple devices that have multiple network interfaces such as Wi-Fi, LTE, Bluetooth, and possibly wired LAN. Such diverse network connectivity can be used to increase both reliability and performance by running applications over multiple links, sequentially for seamless user experience, or in parallel for bandwidth and performance enhancements. The existing networking stack, however, offers almost no support for intelligently exploiting such network, device, and location diversity. In this work, we survey recently proposed protocols and architectures that enable heterogeneous networking support. Upon evaluation, we abstract common design patterns and propose a unified networking architecture that makes better use of a heterogeneous dynamic environment, both in terms of networks and devices. The architecture enables mobile nodes to make intelligent decisions about how and when to use each or a combination of networks, based on access policies. With this new architecture, we envision a shift from current applications, which support a single network, location, and device at a time to applications that can support multiple networks, multiple locations, and multiple devices

Options for Securing RTP Sessions

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is used in a large number of different application domains and environments. This heterogeneity implies that different security mechanisms are needed to provide services such as confidentiality, integrity, and source authentication of RTP and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) packets suitable for the various environments. The range of solutions makes it difficult for RTP-based application developers to pick the most suitable mechanism. This document provides an overview of a number of security solutions for RTP and gives guidance for developers on how to choose the appropriate security mechanism