7,935 research outputs found
An Internet Heartbeat
Obtaining sound inferences over remote networks via active or passive
measurements is difficult. Active measurement campaigns face challenges of
load, coverage, and visibility. Passive measurements require a privileged
vantage point. Even networks under our own control too often remain poorly
understood and hard to diagnose. As a step toward the democratization of
Internet measurement, we consider the inferential power possible were the
network to include a constant and predictable stream of dedicated lightweight
measurement traffic. We posit an Internet "heartbeat," which nodes periodically
send to random destinations, and show how aggregating heartbeats facilitates
introspection into parts of the network that are today generally obtuse. We
explore the design space of an Internet heartbeat, potential use cases,
incentives, and paths to deployment
Hang With Your Buddies to Resist Intersection Attacks
Some anonymity schemes might in principle protect users from pervasive
network surveillance - but only if all messages are independent and unlinkable.
Users in practice often need pseudonymity - sending messages intentionally
linkable to each other but not to the sender - but pseudonymity in dynamic
networks exposes users to intersection attacks. We present Buddies, the first
systematic design for intersection attack resistance in practical anonymity
systems. Buddies groups users dynamically into buddy sets, controlling message
transmission to make buddies within a set behaviorally indistinguishable under
traffic analysis. To manage the inevitable tradeoffs between anonymity
guarantees and communication responsiveness, Buddies enables users to select
independent attack mitigation policies for each pseudonym. Using trace-based
simulations and a working prototype, we find that Buddies can guarantee
non-trivial anonymity set sizes in realistic chat/microblogging scenarios, for
both short-lived and long-lived pseudonyms.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure
FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability
This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that
incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The
Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the
sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of
traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of
misbehavior.
FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no
per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate
a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a
line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second,
limited by the hardware I/O subsystem.
Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an
application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags
packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure
Big Data in Critical Infrastructures Security Monitoring: Challenges and Opportunities
Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as smart power grids, transport systems,
and financial infrastructures, are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats,
due to the adoption of commodity computing facilities. Despite the use of
several monitoring tools, recent attacks have proven that current defensive
mechanisms for CIs are not effective enough against most advanced threats. In
this paper we explore the idea of a framework leveraging multiple data sources
to improve protection capabilities of CIs. Challenges and opportunities are
discussed along three main research directions: i) use of distinct and
heterogeneous data sources, ii) monitoring with adaptive granularity, and iii)
attack modeling and runtime combination of multiple data analysis techniques.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-201
A Lightweight and Flexible Mobile Agent Platform Tailored to Management Applications
Mobile Agents (MAs) represent a distributed computing technology that
promises to address the scalability problems of centralized network management.
A critical issue that will affect the wider adoption of MA paradigm in
management applications is the development of MA Platforms (MAPs) expressly
oriented to distributed management. However, most of available platforms impose
considerable burden on network and system resources and also lack of essential
functionality. In this paper, we discuss the design considerations and
implementation details of a complete MAP research prototype that sufficiently
addresses all the aforementioned issues. Our MAP has been implemented in Java
and tailored for network and systems management applications.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Mobile
Computing and Wireless Communications (MCWC'2006
Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques
SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability
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