Neighbor-Specific BGP: More Flexible Routing Policies While Improving Global Stability

Please Note: This document was written to summarize and facilitate discussion regarding (1) the benefits of changing the way BGP selects routes to selecting the most preferred route allowed by export policies, or more generally, to selecting BGP routes on a per-neighbor basis, (2) the safety condition that guarantees global routing stability under the Neighbor-Specific BGP model, and (3) ways of deploying this model in practice. A paper presenting the formal model and proof of the stability conditions was published at SIGMETRICS 2009 and is available online

Modeling on quicksand: dealing with the lack of ground truth in interdomain routing data

Researchers studying the interdomain routing system, its properties and new protocols, face many challenges in performing realistic evaluations and simulations. Modeling decisions with respect to AS-level topology, routing policies and tra c matrices are complicated by a dearth of ground truth for each of these components. Moreover, scalability issues arise when attempting to simulate over large (although still incomplete) empirically-derived AS-level topologies. In this paper, we discuss our approach for analyzing the robustness of our results to incomplete empirical data. We do this by (1) developing fast simulation algorithms that enable us to (2) running multiple simulations with varied parameters that test the sensitivity of our research results.National Science Foundation (S-1017907), Cisc

Survey on Security Issues in Cloud Computing and Associated Mitigation Techniques

Cloud Computing holds the potential to eliminate the requirements for setting up of high-cost computing infrastructure for IT-based solutions and services that the industry uses. It promises to provide a flexible IT architecture, accessible through internet for lightweight portable devices. This would allow multi-fold increase in the capacity or capabilities of the existing and new software. In a cloud computing environment, the entire data reside over a set of networked resources, enabling the data to be accessed through virtual machines. Since these data-centers may lie in any corner of the world beyond the reach and control of users, there are multifarious security and privacy challenges that need to be understood and taken care of. Also, one can never deny the possibility of a server breakdown that has been witnessed, rather quite often in the recent times. There are various issues that need to be dealt with respect to security and privacy in a cloud computing scenario. This extensive survey paper aims to elaborate and analyze the numerous unresolved issues threatening the cloud computing adoption and diffusion affecting the various stake-holders linked to it.Comment: 20 pages, 2 Figures, 1 Table. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1109.538

Distributed Internet security and measurement

The Internet has developed into an important economic, military, academic, and social resource. It is a complex network, comprised of tens of thousands of independently operated networks, called Autonomous Systems (ASes). A significant strength of the Internet\u27s design, one which enabled its rapid growth in terms of users and bandwidth, is that its underlying protocols (such as IP, TCP, and BGP) are distributed. Users and networks alike can attach and detach from the Internet at will, without causing major disruptions to global Internet connectivity. This dissertation shows that the Internet\u27s distributed, and often redundant structure, can be exploited to increase the security of its protocols, particularly BGP (the Internet\u27s interdomain routing protocol). It introduces Pretty Good BGP, an anomaly detection protocol coupled with an automated response that can protect individual networks from BGP attacks. It also presents statistical measurements of the Internet\u27s structure and uses them to create a model of Internet growth. This work could be used, for instance, to test upcoming routing protocols on ensemble of large, Internet-like graphs. Finally, this dissertation shows that while the Internet is designed to be agnostic to political influence, it is actually quite centralized at the country level. With the recent rise in country-level Internet policies, such as nation-wide censorship and warrantless wiretaps, this centralized control could have significant impact on international reachability

A real-time system for abusive network traffic detection

Abusive network traffic--to include unsolicited e-mail, malware propagation, and denial-of-service attacks--remains a constant problem in the Internet. Despite extensive research in, and subsequent deployment of, abusive-traffic detection infrastructure, none of the available techniques addresses the problem effectively or completely. The fundamental failing of existing methods is that spammers and attack perpetrators rapidly adapt to and circumvent new mitigation techniques. Analyzing network traffic by exploiting transport-layer characteristics can help remedy this and provide effective detection of abusive traffic. Within this framework, we develop a real-time, online system that integrates transport layer characteristics into the existing SpamAssasin tool for detecting unsolicited commercial e-mail (spam). Specifically, we implement the previously proposed, but undeveloped, SpamFlow technique. We determine appropriate algorithms based on classification performance, training required, adaptability, and computational load. We evaluate system performance in a virtual test bed and live environment and present analytical results. Finally, we evaluate our system in the context of Spam Assassin's auto-learning mode, providing an effective method to train the system without explicit user interaction or feedback.http://archive.org/details/arealtimesystemf109455754Outstanding ThesisApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited