In-packet Bloom filters: Design and networking applications

The Bloom filter (BF) is a well-known space-efficient data structure that answers set membership queries with some probability of false positives. In an attempt to solve many of the limitations of current inter-networking architectures, some recent proposals rely on including small BFs in packet headers for routing, security, accountability or other purposes that move application states into the packets themselves. In this paper, we consider the design of such in-packet Bloom filters (iBF). Our main contributions are exploring the design space and the evaluation of a series of extensions (1) to increase the practicality and performance of iBFs, (2) to enable false-negative-free element deletion, and (3) to provide security enhancements. In addition to the theoretical estimates, extensive simulations of the multiple design parameters and implementation alternatives validate the usefulness of the extensions, providing for enhanced and novel iBF networking applications.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, preprint submitted to Elsevier COMNET Journa

Backscatter from the Data Plane --- Threats to Stability and Security in Information-Centric Networking

Information-centric networking proposals attract much attention in the ongoing search for a future communication paradigm of the Internet. Replacing the host-to-host connectivity by a data-oriented publish/subscribe service eases content distribution and authentication by concept, while eliminating threats from unwanted traffic at an end host as are common in today's Internet. However, current approaches to content routing heavily rely on data-driven protocol events and thereby introduce a strong coupling of the control to the data plane in the underlying routing infrastructure. In this paper, threats to the stability and security of the content distribution system are analyzed in theory and practical experiments. We derive relations between state resources and the performance of routers and demonstrate how this coupling can be misused in practice. We discuss new attack vectors present in its current state of development, as well as possibilities and limitations to mitigate them.Comment: 15 page

Traffic Management Applications for Stateful SDN Data Plane

The successful OpenFlow approach to Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows network programmability through a central controller able to orchestrate a set of dumb switches. However, the simple match/action abstraction of OpenFlow switches constrains the evolution of the forwarding rules to be fully managed by the controller. This can be particularly limiting for a number of applications that are affected by the delay of the slow control path, like traffic management applications. Some recent proposals are pushing toward an evolution of the OpenFlow abstraction to enable the evolution of forwarding policies directly in the data plane based on state machines and local events. In this paper, we present two traffic management applications that exploit a stateful data plane and their prototype implementation based on OpenState, an OpenFlow evolution that we recently proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figure